Podcasts about builtwith

Meet Shaurya Jain who's a long time SEO friend and what he shared in this recording were data insights I thought were true but had no data to back it up. Shaurya gives some core insights on why quality matters for SEO site and how that can be measured with tools like BuiltWith.

You see your competitors funnels, they're crushing, but you don't know HOW. So what do you do? Give up, of course.  Just kidding. Reverse engineer their strategies. Today's episode goes headfirst into tracking competitors' funnels, using free tools like SpyFu and BuiltWith, and understanding the importance of analyzing competitors without altering your core strategy.  Hit play during your bathroom break, Marketing Bestie.   Follow Jay: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwedelson/ Podcast: Do This, Not That Follow Daniel: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingmillennials/featured Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Dmurr68 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing Sign up for The Marketing Millennials newsletter: www.workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials   Daniel is a Workweek friend, working to produce amazing podcasts. To find out more, visit: www.workweek.com

Episode 472: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) unveil their list of the best companies making more than $1M annually with no full time employees. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ----- Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Try Shepherd * Shaan's Personal Assistant System * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Show Notes: (00:00) - Introduction (03:50) - Biggest One-Person Business - Stardew Valley, Streamyard, and Plenty of Fish (15:45) - Highest Degree of Difficulty - TinyWow and Photopea (26:00) - Easiest to Recreate: GetCyberLeads, Lenny Rachitsky, and Marketing Examples (36:00) - Most Fun: Joe Rogan and Gym Streak (42:00) - Business You Would Most Want to Own: Milled and BuiltWith (46:30) - Rookie of the Year: Joseph Mambwe and Only Finder (55:30) - Worst of the Best: The Van Trump Report ------ Links: * Stardew Valley * Streamyard * Plenty of Fish * TinyWow * Photopea * GetCyberLeads * Lenny Rachitsky * Marketing Examples * Gym Streak * Milled * BuiltWith * Hampton Blog on Joseph Mambwe * OnlyFinder * Van Trump Report * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about Looker, Reverse ETL, The Flash and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsor: The Mailworks and Miro According to BuiltWith over 375k of the top 1M sites are still on UA Looker Updates – 175 new metrics for your GA data The Analytics for […] The post Now With More Illegal Fireworks! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

Let's be honest. Creating a Tiny Course Empire is not for the tech-averse. There are just so many platforms to master, it can all feel overwhelming. You have to build and manage a website, design sales pages, master your email platform, figure out a shopping cart and payment processors, and make sure your students have easy access to their purchases, too. And you have to connect all of those systems together for better branding and a good user experience. All of that can make the ever-increasing number of all-in-one platforms sound pretty appealing. After all, they promise to do it all with a single login and no troublesome tech to hold you back. But are these all-in-one systems the right choice for you? I'll help you decide. Prefer a transcript? Here you go! What you'll learn in this episode: What makes all-in-one solutions so appealing, especially for new course creators. The pros and cons of using an all-in-one system for your course-based business Pricing “gotchas” to look out for when deciding on which tools to use How to choose an all-in-one platform for launching your business. Resources mentioned: Six-Figure Systems is my monthly program where we create online business success. Join now for just $7 for your first 7 days, and see how Six-Figure Systems can help make your business goals a reality. How did you build that gives you an overview of all the tools I used to build and manage my own Tiny Course Empire. BuiltWith.com shows you all the tech behind any URL. Teachable is my favorite all-in-one platform for course creators. Kajabi is a popular option that includes email marketing in the mix, too. Circle focuses on community building with features for course creators as well. ThriveCart is an all-in-one solution with a big benefit: a one-time payment model.

Prestashop, proyecto de código abierto de origen francés, lanzado en 2008, pronto se convirtió en la plataforma ecommerce de referencia en España. Los datos de plataformas instaladas actualmente, según Builtwith apuntan a que ahora hay ya más Woocommerce que Prestashops, aunque a poco que alguien rasque en esa data enseguida se da cuenta de que las tiendas online con Wordpress suelen ser una forma de empezar sencilla, autogestionada pero que para tomarse en serio el proyecto digital… se acaba quedando pequeño. Esta semana vamos a charlar con Jorge González, cabeza visible de Prestashop en España y Latinoamérica, para entender, sin pelos en la lengua, cuál es el posicionamiento de Prestashop respecto a otras tecnologías pujantes como Shopify, Vtex o Magento, y cómo están trabajando su ecosistema con proyectos como los Essentials o la pasarela de pagos Prestashop Checkout para maximizar los resultados de los negocios desarrollados sobre Prestashop. Enlaces de interés: Más info sobre Prestashop Checkout: https://www.prestashop.com/es/prestashop-checkout [Beloved sponsor] Cambia la manera de comprar; elige cómo pagar, con SeQura: https://bit.ly/sequra-m4c Oferta especial Marketing4eCommerce Academy por 19€/mes (cupón PODCAST): https://bit.ly/academy-podcast

EXPERTENGESPRÄCH | In Teil 1 der Folge haben wir uns angeschaut, welche Strategie-Steps jetzt wichtig für dein Unternehmen sind. Wie beeinflussen Planungsunsicherheiten der Kunden deinen Geschäftsbetrieb? Wenn du Teil 1 also noch nicht gehört hast, wäre es inhaltlich sinnvoll, das nachzuholen. In diesem 2. Teil sprechen wir über die Budgetierung der Marketingausgaben. Außerdem erfährst du alles Wichtige rund um die relevanten KPIs. Du erfährst... …wie wir aktuell am besten mit Rabattaktionen umgehen sollten …welche KPIs gerade in Krisenzeiten besonders relevant sind …ob dein Budget anpassungsfähig sein sollte …wie sinnvoll eine Wettbewerbsanalyse ist …wie du in deinem Unternehmen das Marketing-Budget definieren kannst …ob du unbedingt eine Customer-Data-Plattform für deine Daten brauchst …wie du dein Marketing fahren kannst, wenn du nichts von der Krise merkst …welche Vorgehensweise sich bei der Budgetierung bewährt hat Diese Episode dreht sich schwerpunktmäßig um Online Marketing: Und egal ob SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Performance Advertising, Affiliate Marketing oder E-Mail Marketing – unser Gastmoderator Robin Heintze ist dein Mann! Als Geschäftsführer des Online-Marketing-Spezialisten morefire gibt er mit Expertengästen konkrete Tipps und Tricks von der Strategie bis hin zur Umsetzung deiner Kampagne – natürlich immer mit kleinen Anekdoten aus seiner eigenen Arbeit! __________________________ ||||| PERSONEN |||||

EXPERTENGESPRÄCH | Die letzten Jahre waren sehr krisenreich. Einige Krisen werden uns auch noch länger begleiten. Doch was bedeutet das für dein Unternehmen? Wie kannst du für 2023 eine sinnvolle Marketing-Strategie aufbauen? Erfahre jetzt, ob sich Planung noch lohnt und wie du dein Unternehmen für 2023 absichern kannst. In diesem ersten Teil geht es um die Strategie-Steps, die Planungsunsicherheiten bei Kunden und um die wichtigsten Marketing-Kanäle. Du erfährst... …worauf es bei einer Marketing-Strategie ankommt …welche Elemente in eine Marketing-Strategie reingehören …wie sich die Planung der Kunden verändert hat …ob es Planungsunterschiede zum Beginn der Coronazeit gibt …welche Kanäle für Marketing sinnvoll sind …wie du die einzelnen Strategie-Steps priorisierst …was du nicht tun solltest …was dich in Teil 2 der Folge erwartet Diese Episode dreht sich schwerpunktmäßig um Online Marketing: Und egal ob SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Performance Advertising, Affiliate Marketing oder E-Mail Marketing – unser Gastmoderator Robin Heintze ist dein Mann! Als Geschäftsführer des Online-Marketing-Spezialisten morefire gibt er mit Expertengästen konkrete Tipps und Tricks von der Strategie bis hin zur Umsetzung deiner Kampagne – natürlich immer mit kleinen Anekdoten aus seiner eigenen Arbeit! __________________________ ||||| PERSONEN |||||

did you know Omnisend customers automate 32% of their email conversions. Are you maximizing sales? automate my sales Reading Time: 13 minutes If you're planning to set up an online store, BigCommerce vs Shopify is one of the most important comparisons you'll need to examine. You'll need to determine which one has the features that match the vision you have for your shop, as well as ease-of-use to help minimize the effort required to run your business. Shopify is a staple brand in ecommerce. It has one of the largest market shares among online stores for good reason. It is easy to use even for people without any web programming knowledge. And, through its built-in features and available themes, Shopify allows you to set up your shop and start selling your products in no time. In contrast, BigCommerce isn't among the most widely used ecommerce platforms. Nevertheless, it is undeniably among the best Shopify alternatives because it is comparable in price even when it offers more product and sales features than what's built into a typical Shopify plan. Whether you choose Shopify or BigCommerce, Omnisend lets you automate your marketing across various channels so you can generate sales on autopilot. Start free. BigCommerce vs Shopify On the surface, Shopify vs BigCommerce might not even seem like a useful discussion since Shopify's market share far surpasses that of BigCommerce. According to BuiltWith data, Shopify is used by 2.62% of the top one million websites based on traffic, and 20% of websites that use ecommerce software. It is more popular than Magento and second only to WordPress' WooCommerce Checkout. BigCommerce has a much smaller market share at 0.22% of the top one million high-traffic sites. When you consider only the top 100,000 websites based on traffic, Shopify surpasses WooCommerce and becomes the most popular ecommerce platform while BigCommerce doesn't even make it to the top ten. So, based on usage and popularity, Shopify is definitely the winner. But is that a good reason to dismiss BigCommerce entirely? Apparently, a comprehensive comparison of these two technologies shows that BigCommerce offers several advantages. Choosing either Shopify or BigCommerce would depend heavily on the specific features you seek for the unique requirements of your online business. BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison To help you choose the best platform for your ecommerce venture, here's a compilation of valuable insights from several of the most credible BigCommerce vs Shopify reviews. It breaks down the comparison into the most critical deciding factors and determines each platform's benefits and potential disadvantages. By the end of this report, you'll have a good understanding of each platform's features, pricing, and user-friendliness. You'll also see which one has a better selection of themes and apps that are critical to your website's design and functionality. Additionally, you'll see whether BigCommerce or Shopify has better security features and quality of support. Let's begin. Website Builder Features Among the most commonly praised BigCommerce features is its website builder. If you're creating a store without a programming background, you'll appreciate its drag-and-drop interface. It lets you design web pages by selecting elements and laying them out with the use of your mouse. BigCommerce also ensures that all pages created on the platform are responsive, so you don't miss out on sales from shoppers on mobile devices. Additionally, BigCommerce has a built-in blog that you can use to engage your target audience and establish your reputation as an expert in your niche. Maintaining a blog will also be valuable for SEO and driving targeted traffic to your ecommerce store. Similarly, Shopify features also include a built-in blogging engine that functions practically the same way as BigCommerce's. It also lets you build a mobile responsive online store without having to write a single line of code. And even if it doesn't...

Cómo generar ideas para crear una web o tienda de nicho.Nichos rentables.Nutrición Inmobiliaria Psicología InversionesAbogadosDestacados AmazonCompetenciaRecursos recomendados para crear webs de nicho o tiendas de nicho de afiliados de Amazon:Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin: https://borjagiron.com/aawp Como tienda: WZone - WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates: https://borjagiron.com/wzone Plantilla Storefront o Orbital: https://borjagiron.com/orbital (59€ en lugar de 99€)Comisiones que paga Amazon Afiliados: https://afiliados.amazon.es/help/node/topic/GRXPHT8U84RAYDXZHostinger: Mejor Hosting WordPress al mejor precio: https://borjagiron.com/hostinger Builtwith.com: Analizar web para saber qué plugins usa https://builtwith.com/ Ejemplos webs de nicho: https://Barbacoas.online https://Sillonesdemasaje.shopTutorial gratis cómo he creado las mias: https://triunfacontublog.com/masterclass/como-crear-tienda-afiliados-amazon/- Vas a necesitar crear varias para ganar sueldoIdeas para webs de nicho: 1. Pulseras magnéticas (pocas búsquedas)2. Freidoras sin aceite (Subiendo mucho)3. Ventilador sin aspas silencioso (verano)4. Cafeteras de cápsulas o nespresso (crece) o italiana5. Cortacesped eléctrico (pocas)6. Barbacoas de carbón (estacional)7. Afeitadora corporal o recortador de barba o afeitadora eléctrica (estable)8. Aparato facial de radiofrecuencia (pocas búsquedas)9. Juegos de cartas (caída Trends)10. Frigorífico mini (menos búsquedas), pequeño, combi, americano, frigorífico (mucho crecimiento) Siempre hay búsquedas11. Robot aspirador (pico noviembre bajada tendencia)- Empieza a diseñar como 348: barbacoas.online, crear web de nicho perfectaPatrocinadores y Recursos:Prueba gratis Audible y escucha audiolibros desde https://borjagiron.com/audible Prueba Canva Pro 45 días gratis para crear diseños fácilmente: https://borjagiron.com/canva Hostinger: Mejor hosting WordPress al mejor precio: https://borjagiron.com/hostinger Semrush: Herramienta SEO y Marketing Digital todo en uno: https://borjagiron.com/semrush Sendinblue: Herramienta de Email Marketing: https://borjagiron.com/sendinblue Benchmark Email: Herramienta de Email Marketing: https://borjagiron.com/benchmark Manychat: Automatiza mensajes en Instagram: https://borjagiron.com/manychat Spreaker: Crea tu podcast: https://borjagiron.com/spreakerCursos Marketing Digital Gratis: https://triunfacontublog.com Blog: https://borjagiron.comNewsletter: https://borjagiron.com/newsletter

Builtwith.com Facebook- Page Transparency  WORK WITH ME  Join E-Commerce Society Coaching, Community & Educational Membership For Female Product-Based & E-commerce Business Owners $35/month   Free Guides & Resources For The Win: The Step-By-Step Guide To Getting New Customers Without Paying For Ads Or click here https://marketing-by-kerrie.mykajabi.com/getmorecustomers-freeguide Increase Your Website Conversion Rate For Your Ecommerce Shop Or click here https://marketing-by-kerrie.mykajabi.com/websiteconversion Let's Be Friends Follow Kerrie on Instagram Follow The 6 Figure Product Business Podcast on Instagram www.kerriefitzgerald.com

Wir fangen mit Hörer_innen Fragen an: Macht ESG Sinn? Wo würdet ihr ein Auslandspraktikum machen? Berufseinstieg im Startup oder Consulting / Industrie? Affirm kooperiert jetzt mit Stripe. Frank Thelen wird von Steuerung F durchleuchtet und Pip durfte auch ins (Internet-) Fernsehen. Irgendwelche News zu Lilium. Earnings Teamviewer, Exasol, DigitalOcean und Salesforce. Philipp Glöckler (https://twitter.com/gloeckler) und Philipp Klöckner (https://twitter.com/pip_net) sprechen heute über: (00:06:22) ESG (00:22:00) Affirm Stripe (00:33:30) Wo Praktika (00:46:50) STRG F x Fränki (01:00:40) Lilium (01:14:15) Teamviewer (01:26:30) Exasol (01:29:50) Digital Ocean (01:39:15) Salesforce Shownotes: Frank Thelens Aktien: Wie gefährlich ist seine Masche? | STRG_F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBVdqKC6Cs4 Shoot Now Pay Later: https://twitter.com/pip_net/status/1530832817495629824 Affirm auf BuiltWith: https://twitter.com/gloeckler/status/1531703058186608641 **Doppelgänger Tech Talk Podcast** Sheet https://doppelgaenger.io/sheet/ Earnings & Event Kalender https://www.doppelgaenger.io/kalender/ Disclaimer https://www.doppelgaenger.io/disclaimer/ Post Production by Jan Wagener https://twitter.com/JanAusDemOff

Wie kannst du deinen Wettbewerb analysieren und daraus lernen? Wir haben Tools und Tipps für deine Wettbewerbsanalyse zusammengetragen. Wettbewerbsanalyse und Optimierung deines Online-Auftritts gehen Hand in Hand – und eine gute Analyse ermöglicht dir, deine Zielgruppe besser zu verstehen. Außerdem hilft die Wettbewerbsanalyse dir dabei, Risiken und Chancen frühzeitig zu erkennen. Willkommen zu einem detaillierten How to: Wettbewerbsanalyse. Du erfährst… • …was du aus deiner Wettbewerbsanalyse lernst • …wie eine Wettbewerbsanalyse hilft, deine Zielgruppe zu verstehen • …warum eine Wettbewerbsanalyse dich vor Risiken schützt • …welche Ziele du mit einer Wettbewerbsanalyse erreichen kannst

Síguenos en: Una disminución de un 0,4% en la cuota de mercado de WordPress seguramente no sea una noticia para llenar telediarios ni tenga realmente más importancia de la que le queramos dar, pero si nos sirve de excusa para reflexionar un poco sobre la situación del uso de este CMS y su futuro. Pero antes, como siempre... ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther Batallando con la burocracia de grandes clientes. Semana Nahuai Trasteando con el portal de clientes de Stripe y la API para obtener métricas. Directo en Linkedin con Jesús Pérez sobre cómo darse a conocer en internet. Consultoría web con el creador de InstaWP. Mañana Meetup WordPress Terrassa con David Perálvarez. Contenido Nahuai 3 nuevos tutorial en Código Genesis, de los cuales destaca: Tema de la semana: Por primera vez en 19 años la cuota de mercado de WordPress no ha crecido, de hecho ha disminuido un poco (0,4%). Estadísticas de W3Techs que toma los datos de los 10 millones de sitios más visitados según el ranking the Alexa. Los datos de HTTP Archive y Web Almanac se basan en: Datos de WebPageTestDetecciones de WappalyzerBase de datos de Chrome UX Report Cambio anual según las 3 principales fuentes: W3Techs: subida anual del 1.7% Web Almanac: subida anual de 0.4%BuiltWith: bajada anual de 3.8% Dudas ¿Quién ha dejado de utilizar WordPress?Usuarios DIY, freelancers o agencias¿Porqué había crecido tanto la cuota de WordPress?Porque era mejor, porque era gratis, por los bloques...Han crecido (muy poco) Wix y Squarespace.Tanto Shopify, Drupal como Joomla han bajado.  Posibles motivos: Rendimiento web (por debajo de otras plataformas)Complejidad para el usuario (admin, alternativas más simples Shopify, Wix...)Necesidad de plugins para funciones básicas (tanto en WP core como en WooCommerce)Mayor complejidad para desarrolladores¿Miedo al FSE?¿Está tardando demasiado el FSE?Post-pandemiaMenor inversión en marketingFalta de contribuidores a tiempo completo (sponsorizados) Reflexión sobre qué cuota de mercado creemos razonable. ¿Ha llegado plateau? Si es así ¿es un problema? Análisis de Joost Análisis de WP Tavern Análisis Ellipsis Novedades Justin Tadlock deja WP Tavern. Tip de la semana Podcast Details, una herramienta online, creada por Alex Barredo, para ver las métricas de un podcast. Menciones Jesús y Xavi comparten el episodio de accesibilidad con Vicent. Vicent nos comenta que los encabezados sigue teniendo el asesor de contraste pero los botones no.

Síguenos en: Una disminución de un 0,4% en la cuota de mercado de WordPress seguramente no sea una noticia para llenar telediarios ni tenga realmente más importancia de la que le queramos dar, pero si nos sirve de excusa para reflexionar un poco sobre la situación del uso de este CMS y su futuro. Pero antes, como siempre... ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther Batallando con la burocracia de grandes clientes. Semana Nahuai Trasteando con el portal de clientes de Stripe y la API para obtener métricas. Directo en Linkedin con Jesús Pérez sobre cómo darse a conocer en internet. Consultoría web con el creador de InstaWP. Mañana Meetup WordPress Terrassa con David Perálvarez. Contenido Nahuai 3 nuevos tutorial en Código Genesis, de los cuales destaca: Tema de la semana: Por primera vez en 19 años la cuota de mercado de WordPress no ha crecido, de hecho ha disminuido un poco (0,4%). Estadísticas de W3Techs que toma los datos de los 10 millones de sitios más visitados según el ranking the Alexa. Los datos de HTTP Archive y Web Almanac se basan en: Datos de WebPageTestDetecciones de WappalyzerBase de datos de Chrome UX Report Cambio anual según las 3 principales fuentes: W3Techs: subida anual del 1.7% Web Almanac: subida anual de 0.4%BuiltWith: bajada anual de 3.8% Dudas ¿Quién ha dejado de utilizar WordPress?Usuarios DIY, freelancers o agencias¿Porqué había crecido tanto la cuota de WordPress?Porque era mejor, porque era gratis, por los bloques...Han crecido (muy poco) Wix y Squarespace.Tanto Shopify, Drupal como Joomla han bajado.  Posibles motivos: Rendimiento web (por debajo de otras plataformas)Complejidad para el usuario (admin, alternativas más simples Shopify, Wix...)Necesidad de plugins para funciones básicas (tanto en WP core como en WooCommerce)Mayor complejidad para desarrolladores¿Miedo al FSE?¿Está tardando demasiado el FSE?Post-pandemiaMenor inversión en marketingFalta de contribuidores a tiempo completo (sponsorizados) Reflexión sobre qué cuota de mercado creemos razonable. ¿Ha llegado plateau? Si es así ¿es un problema? Análisis de Joost Análisis de WP Tavern Análisis Ellipsis Novedades Justin Tadlock deja WP Tavern. Tip de la semana Podcast Details, una herramienta online, creada por Alex Barredo, para ver las métricas de un podcast. Menciones Jesús y Xavi comparten el episodio de accesibilidad con Vicent. Vicent nos comenta que los encabezados sigue teniendo el asesor de contraste pero los botones no.

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sits down with Steph Smith (@StephSmithio), indie creator and host of the "Sh*t You Didn't Learn in School" podcast, to talk about companies with only one employee that are making millions and what we can learn from them.  _____ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Would you like to participate in our clips contest? Earn up to $10k by remixing My First Million episodes. To learn more, go to mfmpod.com/clips. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. _____ Show Notes: (00:50) - How Steph plans to become a billionaire (04:30) - BuiltWith.com, Levels.io, and Ugmonk. (08:00) - Carrd. About.me. Unfold. Media kits. (11:30) - NextEpisode.net (18:30) - The MotoMeter (22:15) - HeadLime (26:00) - Sites that have a surprising amount of traffic - GlitchnDealz.com, FoodTimeline.org (40:30) - "Your listicle is my opportunity" (45:15) - Magnus Carlsen and chess

Jeder kennt den Gedanken - Wie schön wäre es dieses und jenes Unternehmen seinen Kunden zu nennen. Doch mit Account Based Marketing kommst du jetzt deinen Traumkunden einen Schritt näher. Es ist eine hervorragende Möglichkeit Zielkunden zu erreichen und zu vermitteln, dass es an deinem Unternehmen kein Vorbeikommen gibt. Zoran Katic, Geschäftsführer bei der Pluspulso GmbH, verrät, wie mit spezifisch abgestimmtem Marketing, Zielkunden erreicht und kontaktiert werden können. Du erfährst... • …wie Account Based Marketing funktioniert • …was das Ziel dahinter ist • …warum es auch wichtig für dein Unternehmen ist • …wie du damit an schwierige Kunden kommst

In this episode, we interviewed Fahad Siraj, an Indian Chartered Accountant turned e-com entrpreneur based out of Dubai. He is currently running various coaching brands that are aimed at helping 9to5 executives run microservice based agencies.In this interview, we spoke about his journey from coming from a finance background to starting his e-commerce business to becoming an e-com coach and how he is helping a lot of people find success online.In this interview, Fahad shares:-His journey from e-commerce to mentorship.How are things different in Dubai in terms of business and exposure as compared to India?How did he start micro-service?How does this model work?2 ways e-com entrepreneurs mess up with any business idea.His approach to market research.His strategy for reaching out to people.Does he use automation or write manual messages?Using LinkedIn, BuiltWith and email as a business tool.His business style.Most valuable advice for e-com entrepreneurs out there.References:Fahad's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fahadecom/Email: fahad@enormemarketing.comYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfzZtzkOOTnjyeVTf79-lBA/Website: https://www.enormemarketing.com/partnerReferences: enormemarketing.com Sales Navigator Want to get started with your eCommerce business?Join the 5-Day eCom freedom challenge: http://joinefc.in  If you want my team and me to help you start, scale and grow your eCommerce, Dropshipping or Print on Demand business from scratch, apply for our group mentorship programme here: https://digitaldukaandaar.com/applyAnd for those of you looking to get started with your eCommerce Store, I highly use and recommend Shopify. You can go to https://nishkarshsharma.com/shopify and get started with your 14-day trial. Nishkarsh's Social Media Profiles:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nishkarshsharmaa/   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nishkarsh.sharma/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DigitalDukaandaar/videos  If you like the episode, do share it with someone who really needs to listen to this. Loads of love & care

Most marketers know that personalization can improve conversions. But how do you implement personalization at scale? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, McGaw.io founder Dan McGaw digs into the details of how companies large and small are building marketing technology stacks that allow them to create highly personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. Considered "one of the original growth hackers," Dan specializes in building tech stacks that drive results at the middle and bottom of the funnel. In this episode, he discusses how companies can build and leverage Amazon-like automation without the need for expensive back end developer resources, and how to do it without seeming creepy to your audience. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details. Resources from this episode: Visit McGaw.io to learn more about Dan and his work advising companies on their marketing tech stacks Text "creepy" to (415) 915-9011 to experience Dan's personalization test Watch Dan's webinar on How to Build a Martech Stack Visit UTM.io and enter your email to get in touch with Dan Connect with Dan on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Dan McGaw, who is the founder of Mcgaw.io. Welcome to the podcast, Dan. Dan (00:23): Hey, how are you today? Kathleen (00:26): I am awesome. How are you? Dan (00:29): I'm doing amazing. Thanks for having me here. Kathleen (00:31): Yeah. I am excited to have you here because we get to talk about some nerdy marketing stuff having to do with e-commerce, which is currently a favorite topic of mine. And I say nerdy and I put myself first in line of the list of nerds who care about these things. But before we dig into this topic could you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and Mcgaw.io? Dan (00:56): Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I'm Dan, I'm the CEO and founder of Mcgaw.io. But I've been in the marketing tech space for over 20 years. So I got my start in 1998, sending mass emails since, before there was even mass emails. So as I like to say to people, I just kind of have seen some I've been around for a long period of time. but some people recognize me for when I was the head of marketing at Kissmetrics. I replaced Neil Patel as the head of marketing at that company. Before that I was head of growth another company called Codeschool.com. We were one of the pioneers in the online education space for developers. So some people know of Codecademy or Team Treehouse, Code School. We took the early exit. We sold out to Pluralsite, which is the publicly traded company in that space. Dan (01:36): So as you might imagine, I'm very technical. I'm also very analytical, but I'm also understand marketing and sales really well. And some random things about me. I was coined as one of the original growth hackers, which is kind of terrifying. Somebody called me that one time. And then it kind of caught fire. And I've just been involved with MarTech for a long time, but with Mcgaw.io right, like we're a marketing technology and marketing analytics agency, but it's like, what the hell does that mean? Right. That's just difficult to say in general. We help companies with two main problems. Either they lack of visibility in the customer journey, or they lack the ability to engage in the customer journey. So we help companies choose their tools, integrate their tools, operate those tools, and always are focused on trying to make the money. Dan (02:14): But the big focus for us is that we are not a marketing agency because we don't do PPC, SEO, content marketing, as we would say that TOFU, Top of funnel stuff. All of our work is on the middle and bottom of funnel, leveraging technology. So when you think about that, that nerd that you wish you had on your marketing team, that's probably our team, right? When you think about that developer, you want on your team, that's us. But we do a lot of work with Marketo, Amplitude, Salesforce, but we're tool agnostic. So you can come to us with any stack and we'll help you build your stack. And that's really what our niche is, is the marketing stack. Kathleen (02:45): There is such a huge need for what you're doing in the marketing world right now. And I say this as a marketer who does not come with a highly technical background. I mean, I was like a political science major. Don't ask me how I wound up in marketing. That's a whole story that we don't have time for. But you know, it's interesting because I've worked with a lot of different marketers over the years and some of the best marketers I know do have unusually technical backgrounds. Like one in particular that I'm thinking of who I've worked with for many years, she has a computer science engineering undergrad, and a marketing MBA. And I was like, man, are you the perfect combination of skillsets? So I love that. That's what your team, you know, that's sort of the profile of your team and what they work on. Kathleen (03:34): One of the reasons I was really excited to talk to you, as I said, is because of the work you do in e-commerce. You know, if people regularly listen to the podcast, they may or may not know that in my day job, I'm head of marketing for a company that is selling into the e-commerce space. And it's been really interesting for me because I've been in marketing for a long time. I own an agency. I've worked with a lot of different companies, but I hadn't necessarily done a ton in e-commerce. And it's been fascinating to me to learn just, like, the level of performance marketing that is required to do well in e-commerce. I mean, you know, it stands to reason, but I think from my experience that I've had so far, the e-commerce marketers I've met are the most data-driven marketers I've come across in my career, hands down by a long shot. Kathleen (04:26): And I guess, you know, it's because it's sink or swim, right? All their, all of their revenue is coming through digital as opposed to, you know, other types of companies that can get by, on, you know, business development and events and, you know, pressing the flesh at in-person networking things when those come back. You can't do that in e-commerce. So anyway, I'm going on and on, I will stop, but I'm fascinated by this because it really does take, you need to have a very data-driven mindset and you need to have the right stack in place in order to do it well. So I just want to kind of like turn it over to you to react to that. And, and I'm curious if you found the same thing in terms of e-commerce marketers tending to be more kind of technical and data-driven performance marketers than marketers in other spaces. Dan (05:13): Yeah. And, you know, I think our views of the world maybe are slightly different. Cause I tend to see one of the things that, and it depends of course, on the type of e-commerce business, whether it's B2B or B2C. But what we have seen historically, and there's a joke inside of our company that B2C marketers, e-commerce is what we're talking about, are fighting basically with sticks and stones. And then when you talk to a B2B marketer, typically not going to be e-commerce right, but typically fighting with machine guns and crossbows and all kinds of stuff, which are really intimidating. So I, what I will say is I, while I am saying somewhat I disagree with you, I actually do agree with you on the data-driven part heavily. And the reason why I say that is in B2B companies, when you have this larger transaction, that's a sale through Salesforce, you lose track of that, the time that it becomes a lead, right? Dan (05:58): Like it becomes a lead and then its in Salesforce and like, okay, well that's sales's problem. So there's hence why there's a little bit of that separation there. And then same in SaaS, like there's that first purchase, but then there's this subscription, right. Which they don't really track, but in e-commerce right, the marketer is heavily responsible, even more so than in any other company for the purchase, which is the only thing there is now, the marketer is also responsible for the repeat purchase, which is usually what marketers are not responsible for in any of those other situations. So I will agree with you in an e-commerce there's this innate focus on performance marketing, and then as well as the purchases, because that performance marketing, paid media, whatever it may be in there is so directly connected to their success and failure that it's just, they're, they're extremely focused on that. Dan (06:42): And I think performance marketers in general are very, very data-driven on that that spectrum of what they're looking at, but it's also a shorter cycle. Like I think about, so one of our clients is Hydro, right? Hydro is the Peloton of rowing. And they are super focused on paid media because that's where all their stuff comes from. So we are constantly analyzing their data and looking at that tiny little funnel. So there's definitely a big data-driven focus, but the way that they look at that data compared to like some of my SaaS companies or my B2B companies, very, very different. And I'm not saying anything is lesser or more on either side. I'm just saying the way that they look at the data and what they're looking at of course is very, very different. Kathleen (07:19): You make some really good points and I should actually append my comment to say that there's, it's impossible to make sweeping statements about quote unquote e-commerce because that is a very, very large basket of companies. And I think the companies that we've started to deal with tend to be maybe on the mid market side, as opposed to the micro side, there are, it's a lot of teeny tiny mom and pop e-commerce businesses that I'm certain are not employing you know, world-class growth marketers. So I should clarify those comments that I made. Dan (07:51): I mean, I have to say so, and we, we have very fortunate to work with hundreds of clients at this point. Some of the biggest companies that we've worked with, like, and I'm not going to say their names, but like large companies, their marketers were, we were like, how do you guys even sell this stuff? Like, how did you, but then you realize, okay, well, not everybody wants to work at a large company. Like in the mid market, that's where you see some of the bad-ass people cause everybody, and especially with millennials and even more so now gen Z, they want to make an impact and they want to see growth. So at a big company, they can't make an impact. There's just, it's just too, what am I going to do? I'm going to make one thousandth of a percent of a difference? Like I don't care. So I think the mid market where you're talking about for sure, you're going to see a lot more of that like, let's get this. So yeah, I think some of the best marketers I meet are at small companies and they're just so smart that their company is small because of it. So it goes both ways. It goes both ways. Kathleen (08:46): Great point. Well, one of the things that I think is interesting is you've done some work on the concept of personalization and how marketers can use that through the customer journey in order to improve outcomes. Tell me a little bit more about what you're doing there. Dan (09:04): Yeah. So personalization to me is amazing, right? Like I love being able to personalize every single thing to the individual we're interacting with, whether that's online or offline. So I definitely like to be able to consume as much data as we can. And we've done everything from personalization, like hardcore personalization and direct mail to obviously retargeting programs, email things SMS, every single channel you can imagine we've been able to do really, really hardcore personalization. And just as a, as a fun test, and I don't I don't know how well your audience is, is it okay that I have an SMS test and show everybody something to test out? So in, in marketing naturally, there's the ability to do data enrichment. So what we did is we felt that we would try to make people aware with just your email. We can kind of come up with some creepy information. Dan (09:47): So what I want ever to do is pull out your cell phone and I'm going to tell you to text the word creepy to this phone number. And if you do this, and you're well known on the internet, it tells you everything we found out about you on the internet. Kathleen (10:03): Oh can I do it as we're talking? Dan (10:03): Absolutely. And it's about your company and it's about you and things like that. Now, I haven't tested this service out. We made this for a conference and it did very well, but the phone number is (415) 915-9011. So I'll say that again. (415) 915-9011 and text "creepy" to it. When you text creepy to it, give it a little bit, it will text you back and it should ask you for your email. Now, if it doesn't email you back and if it doesn't text you back and ask for your email, shoot me an email at dan@mcgaw.io because I want to know why it's not working. But that being said, you should get a text back in a little bit. That then says, Hey, tell me your email. When you get that email, give it your email and go through the process. And then we'll come back to this conversation later. Kathleen (10:48): I am super interested to see what this turns up, especially because like, side note, I can definitely be found on the internet, but it's really funny. I got a Google alert for my name. This was several months back. And it was an article that was written saying that I was one of the top 10 women in computer science. And I was like, what the heck is going on here? And there's a famous woman named Kathleen Booth who invented like computer programming language, who I don't even think he's alive anymore. And Google was pulling my picture for her Wikipedia entry. And so when people were writing this article, they like tagged my Twitter account and put my picture. Kathleen (11:25): I was like, really? Wow. I wish I could take credit for all that, but I can not. Dan (11:30): Use your corporate address when it does ask you for your email, but it takes a few minutes for it to respond back. It's doing some backwards math right now. So, but use your corporate address that way and also give you your company email. But for us, when we think about any one of our clients or anybody out there doing personalization is there's all these other places to get information from. So with just an email address, you can ping full contact com. It will give you all kinds of demographic information. You can ping clearbit.com. It'll give you firmographic, demographic and technographic information. You could ping builtwith and just get technographic. You can ping Tower Data. You could be super expensive and go to Melissa Data or Experian. The creepiest thing that I ever got was I wanted to test out Experian data. They have it on their website. I don't know where, but you can put in anybody's email and they'll tell you what they know about that person. And I put in my wife's email Meredith at amazing corps.com. It told me that she has kids, she's into soccer, she's into baseball, she drives a large SUV, like, and it gave me like 35 attributes. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is so creepy. But that's, that's the truth. Kathleen (12:31): Use your powers for good and not evil. Dan (12:34): Yeah, it's totally. But like I've done some crazy stuff in personalization. We learned this from OkCupid. There's a, when we know where you are from your IP, we know exactly where you are, your lat, longitude. We know where you are basically within a hundred miles guaranteed. And if we ask you for your zip code, we know where you are within usually five miles, right? So if we know the weather, we can change the experience that you're going to have on our website or in an email or in a text message because it's now raining. So as an example, and I can't say the client's name, unfortunately, but just imagine you're Banana Republic, right? Very, very large company. They have the budget to do this. And you go to their website because you're trapped inside because it's rainy. And as soon as you come to the website, you start seeing people in rain attire. Dan (13:16): Well, you were immediately connected to that experience. There there's, there's a one-to-one match. You're going to be engaged. Now, if it's sunny outside, you can make it so there's a sunny experience. You're going to be engaged. So by simply knowing the local weather, you can, you can engage the consumer at a much better way and optimize their experience and sell more products. And this is done, even like Burger King. Burger King is the best. I think they, they did the best thing. If you're within 500 yards of a McDonald's, we will give you a free Whopper. Just download the Burger King app and we'll prove it to you. You would drive within 500 yards of a McDonald's and you would get a notification. You have five minutes to claim your free Whopper, go to a Burger King now. Kathleen (13:58): That's genius. I have not heard about that one before, but Burger King has such good marketing. I mean, so good. Dan (14:05): Because of their stack, they bought a contract with mParticle and Radar, and they, they built this amazing stack to do these cool things and the campaign crushed it. Like, just so those are the types of personalization, things that like, I get super focused and excited about because you're starting to take into consideration all the things that maybe people aren't telling you as well. Kathleen (14:24): So I have a lot of questions, but before I get to them about, specifically about the stack and about personalization, the one that immediately prings to mind when I hear something like this is like, is this the kind of thing that smaller companies can do? Or do you have to be like Burger King or Banana Republic? Or what have you. Dan (14:43): Great question. And for me, yes, as a small company, you can do these things. It is going to take a little bit of elbow grease, not going to lie. It is going to take some work, but you can definitely do it. So in my book, so I wrote the book Build Cool Shit. Really, really short book, about 125 pages. It's got color pictures in. It makes it nice and easy to read. What I always struggled with is I've worked with some of the, I mean, I've worked with some of the best companies out there and I get to work with some of the smallest companies. I always feel bad because they're not playing at the same playing field, right? Like, so in my book, if you went to mcgaw.io, my book is offered for free in the top of the headline. Dan (15:17): You can definitely go there and do it and get a free copy of it. And the whole point is about talking about how do you break down the stack to make this easy for a small business to understand, and then also hook them up with the tools which are going to be free for them to use. So, as an example, we love using Segment to implement our stacks because it makes integration easy. Well, Segment is free for most small businesses. Maybe it's a hundred dollars a month, right? Maybe it's a hundred bucks. That's not that much of a cost for the value that you're going to get in return out of it. If you set things up correctly, you then have Autopilot, which is the marketing automation tool that we recommend. You can get Autopilot for less than a hundred dollars a month, but it does a lot of powerful stuff. Dan (15:51): You can build SMS bots with it. You can do direct mail directly through the product. You can do email marketing, you can do on site pop-ups, it does pretty much everything. And it's extremely easy for a small business use. You just have to invest the time to learn it. I'm actually staring at my Autopilot dashboard right now, waiting for your text message to come in, which it just pinged the system. So you should get a text back in just a second, by the way. Naturally Autopilot is easy, but if you then set up Amplitude, don't get me wrong, it's not the easiest platform in the world is set up but you can do it. Just hire somebody on Upwork, you know, have amazing marketing analytics and amazing way to pass your customer data and an amazing way to do marketing automation and engagement. So you can do these things. It just takes some, some elbow grease. It's not going to be easy, right. But a small business can afford it. And a small business can definitely do it. Kathleen (16:36): So Segment, Autopilot and Amplitude are the ones that you've just mentioned is that right? Dan (16:42): Yep. Segment, Autopilot, Amplitude would be the three easy tools to get set up. So you can have interesting superpowers. Kathleen (16:47): And I, I'm not familiar with Amplitude. What does that one do? Dan (16:50): Yeah, so Amplitude. So you have Google analytics, which tells you kind of what's happening on your site, but it tells you more about traffic and channels. Amplitude is going to enable you to be able to see much more of the behavior that somebody is using and then track what an individual user is doing. So as somebody who's using your website, you can of course, track who that person is, see what pages they visit to see what's going on and better understand their analytics. Amplitude is a little bit more advanced, but it is going to give you the ability to track your e-commerce funnel. It's going to give you better ability to track repeat purchase rate. As you might be familiar, Google analytics doesn't track repeat purchase rate. It also doesn't track revenue per customer. Amplitude is going to be able to give you those features. Kathleen (17:27): Oh, shoot. I just responded to your text with the creepy experiment and my phone auto corrected my email address. Just something different. So can I still send the correct one or is that, is it now not going to work? Dan (17:40): It's not going to work. Kathleen (17:41): Okay. I'm going to start it over. Dan (17:45): So you cannot. Let's look the logic, so to see what happens, it is going to take your email. Oh, you're, you're, you're so trapped in it. Kathleen (17:57): I'm so sad now because I was really excited about that. Darn autocorrect! Dan (18:01): Wait five minutes and then it should correct itself. Kathleen (18:07): So I can resend the creepy? New Speaker (18:11): It has a five minute delay, so that at the end of five minutes, it will kick you out of the journey and you can start it over again. So we'll try it again in five minutes. Kathleen (18:18): Cool. I'm like so bummed out. All right. So, so it's accessible to small businesses. Let's talk about as the, as the business gets larger, what other tools are in the toolbox? And like, talk to me about like really, how does this play out in terms of how this information is used in the customer journey? Because my one thing about personalization is like, I get that you can use it a million different ways, but I do feel like there are some things you can do that, like they're fun and they're novel, but are you really going to see anything from them? You know what I mean? Like is the juice worth, the squeeze kind of thing. Dan (18:55): Yeah. And that's definitely a big one is a lot of companies don't understand which juice is worth squeezing. Right. So, cause if you squeeze lime juice, like naturally nobody cares. So it would totally agree with you there. I think the biggest thing that we have to focus on is one, how do we as part of the customer experience, tailor that experience, so they're going to purchase more, right? Just because you can create magic doesn't mean that you should. And I think a lot of companies where this really goes awry, just because you can create automation, they create a ton of it. And just because you have automation doesn't mean you should know the hell out of me. Like if you sat in a restaurant, somebody leaned over your shoulder and was like, Hey, you want to buy the glass of wine. Dan (19:28): You'd be like, I'm good. But if they did that every 35 minutes, right, while you're at the restaurant, you're like, I'm never coming back to here again. Right. So you make sure that you do it ethically and kind of with a right frame of mind to get them to purchase. But when you think about trying to like, keep it really, really simple in regards to like personalization, try to help people pick up where they left off. Right? So we worked with a company called Carolina Designs Realty out of the Outer Banks. They're one of the largest vacation rental realtor companies. When you go to the Outer Banks. So they have like 300 something homes all over the place. They're like the premier vendor, great company. One of the things that we did to help them really be able to maximize their revenue was is that when people basically came in to check out houses, we set it up so that every single time they looked at a house, their marketing automation tool would save the URL of the previous house that they were at. Dan (20:17): So as they're going through the website, they also have the ability to save a listing. So they would hit save a listing. It would save that listing, save it in marketing automation, send them an email with their saved listing. Great. We saved their listing. We sent that on. Now that wasn't rocket science to build, but it really helped get people back into the process. So having the ability to favorite something in an e-commerce store and then saving that, and then emailing it to them, that's personalization, that's still personalizing their experience. Now what you need to do to make that even more effective is that when you then send your newsletter or your thing, the bottom of the email, add a little spot that says pick up where you left off. Show an image of the product that they last looked at, the name of the product and anything on it, and then offer them a 10% discount on it, right? Dan (20:58): Like, come back, pick up where you left off, we'll offer you 10% off. Just use this promo code. Building those systems, while it sounds really difficult, really isn't that hard? Yes. If you need help, email me, dan@mcgaw.io. I'll send you to the exact webinar where we show you how to do this. I talk about it in my book as well, but that kind of little personalization is how you get people back into the funnel. Right. And that's what a lot of this stuff needs to be focused on is how do we get them back to purchasing, but making it more personalized to them. Kathleen (21:27): So I will, if you send me the link, I will definitely include the link to that webinar in the show notes to make it easy for people to find it. Cause I do think that that would be interesting. When does personalization, speaking of your earlier experiment, get creepy? Because there is a little bit of a big brother aspect to it. Just because you can doesn't mean you should, there's the annoyance factor, but then there's also the creep out factor, Dan (21:55): Super, super creep out factor. Right. So definitely happens, not gonna lie. So I have a talk that I did called When Personalization Gets Creepy and How Not To Do It Wrong. And that's where this whole automation came from is this whole creepy request. Right? So either way, there's definitely times when it goes wrong. So, and I'll use just a couple simple examples. I mean, Target, as an example, got really, really creepy back in the early two thousands. Target can predict with 85% accuracy that you're pregnant. Kathleen (22:27): Oh, I heard these stories. Dan (22:28): Yeah. And they sent a mailer, a direct mailer to a 16 year old girl who was pregnant based upon her loyalty card usage. And the father lost his mind. The father then had to apologize. He went to the news, complained. He then had to apologize because come to find out his daughter was pregnant. Now that's pushing it too far. Now Target made a mistake. It is what it is. Like, whatever. Kathleen (22:48): They also did similar things and targeted women who had just had miscarriages, which didn't go over really well. Dan (22:55): Yeah. That doesn't go off well. Pinterest did the same things with brides. Just because you're looking at wedding dresses doesn't mean that you're going to have a wedding. It just means you like the dress. So that was super hysterical. And then Shutterstock had a snafu with baby pictures, people looking at baby pictures, congratulations on your new baby. And it's like, this is not my baby. So, so people, we always make mistakes and sometimes you have to understand like whatever, like we're going to make a mistake. And I think sometimes we get too worried about being crazy. But there are times that you shouldn't be telling people, Hey, we know where you are like, Oh, like, you don't need to tell me that. So like there's definitely ways that you can kind of push that line. But the thing that we always try to tell people is like, don't use their images and stuff. Like try not to sound if it sounds creepy, like just, just put that little bit on there. Kathleen (23:51): It's so funny. Cause as you're saying this, it's reminding me of that little, like song about Santa. He knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake. And I'm like, Santa sounds really creepy now. Dan (24:03): I totally agree with you on that one. Right. So Santa can sound really, really creepy sometimes. Yeah, I would agree. But yeah, just don't be creepy is the big one. Kathleen (24:13): So talk me through, if you would some actual examples of companies or customers and you can anonymize them if you need to, but like use personalization as part of their marketing and like what really have the results been. Because again, I think there's many ways you can use this. Not all of them will actually produce results. So I'm curious to know like what kind of a lift does it give you? Dan (24:38): Yeah, great question. So we worked with an easy story that I can think about is we worked with a large vegan company. So their job was to sell vegan products. Vegan softwares, vegan stuff. And people really, really know of them in this market. So people would come to their website because they found a vegan recipe or because they found them through their content or something like that. And they would, they would download a recipe, right? They'd type in their email. Here's your vegan recipe. We sent you an email with that recipe. Check it out. Now with that email, we would also ask the question, Hey, where are you at in your vegan transition? Because if you don't know, most people who are looking at vegan recipes, aren't vegan. They're trying to become vegan. They're vegan, curious as we might say. So we had to understand where were they at in that buyer's journey to make sure that we could deliver the right products to them at the right time. Dan (25:28): And this was the best type of personalization. If you're vegan, you probably liked our dressings or our grain kits. If you're not vegan and you're trying to become vegan and failing, you probably need access to our cooking school or our meal planning service or something else. You needed more help there. So the first email you would get would ask you, where are you at in your vegan journey? Are you just vegan curious? Are you trying to become vegan and struggling? Are you currently crushing it and need more help? Or are you completely vegan and you don't need us for anything? People would click on that button. It would have a UTM parameter, which you know what a UTM is right. So click on that. They go back to the website, the website would know the UTM parameters. We now see that in Google analytics, which was great. Our automation tool would save that and then bucket all of those users into the right journey. Dan (26:11): So with that being said, the user would now their next email would be focused on products which of course would be better able to serve them. So as an example, if I'm vegan curious, and I don't know what it is, I'm going to be sent information. This is why you should become vegan. Maybe you should look at your heart. Maybe you should look at your diabetes. Maybe you should look at these things. What we're able to do, what our major metric was, is you don't want to look at purchase rate cause sometimes that can be a little skewed based upon the people you're getting. What we looked at, what we were most focused on, was the average lifetime value of a customer. Could we get a customer from spending $25 to spending $50 or spending more? And then we track each one of those cohorts of users. Dan (26:47): So the users who were already vegan, we weren't making any money on them because we kept sending them stuff saying, why don't you sign up for our cooking class or sign up for a meal planning class. They don't need that. They're already vegan. Well, because we started sending them the things they would actually use, like grain kits or something like that, or cereal, something that they could actually eat. We're actually able to double their lifetime value in a very, very short period of time because now they're actually being served stuff that they care about. That's the easiest personalization you can do. I mean, that's list segmentation. So that type of stuff makes a massive impact. But going back to leveraging Segment, leveraging a good marketing automation tool, having Amplitude, I had Amplitude in that case. So I could actually see those metrics. I could see those cohorts. I could see the amount of money I made for each one of those cohorts because I had the analytics. I could really track that stuff. Kathleen (27:31): That's cool. Dan (27:34): So, okay. So I got a notification. I hate to text. You can text creepy. You've been kicked out of the journey. I do know that you're I did get some facts about you, which have already been populated into the system. Kathleen (27:45): Is it the right me? Dan (27:47): Well kbooth@clean.i. Kathleen (27:50): Yeah. It's missing the o. Auto-correct removed it. Dan (27:53): I got you. I got your your address. So from the mistake, is the company in Annapolis? Kathleen (28:00): Nope, that's my home. Dan (28:02): Oh, see, look at that. Right. I got your zip code and Annapolis already. Don't even have the correct email. I apologize to interject with the creepy thing again. Kathleen (28:13): That's good. I love this. I love that we're doing this real time. It's awesome. Dan (28:17): The segmentation is huge. So we did the same thing in my book. If you, if you check out the book, we use a company called realthread.com. They're actually a company. They make t-shirts. Kathleen (28:27): I know Real Thread. I used to be head of marketing for a company and they, we had a partnership with them and they did all of our t-shirts for our conferences and they would actually send a team to the event and like screen print on the shirts live. Dan (28:42): I loved it. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. So Real Thread has been a client of ours for five years. Like they've been around since like the beginning. I'm buddies with the founder and stuff like that. Now we did the same thing when people signed up for their email list because they have multiple different personas. So, Hey, thanks for joining our email list. We just want to make sure that we don't send you crappy email. Are you a designer, a business owner, a t-shirt a marketer, like, what are these things? People click on the button, we then change their experience. So now when we send our newsletter, instead of sending business owners, you should choose the right Pantone for the inks that you put on your shirt. The CEO doesn't care about pantones. If you don't know what pantones are, those are colors. Some. Very rarely, right. So this same thing is in my book, it talks about how you can create that system to make it so you can segment your list. And I think that's what most people really, they don't ask enough questions. They make assumptions. And it's like, your customers are nine times out of 10 willing to give you the information. If you phrase it in a way that's going to make their experience. Everybody uses Facebook, even though they know their data is being sold because they know it makes their experience better. Right? Like tell we're going to make your experience better. And they'll tell you information. Yeah. Kathleen (29:44): It's the whole principle behind like, choose your own adventure. You know, and I love the idea of years ago I spoke to somebody at HubSpot. It was a woman who ran their email strategy and they, they made a change along these lines where after you first converted on something they would put you into this, this nurturing sequence that was like the first immersion I think they called it. And the first email you got was exactly like what you're talking about. And it was sort of like, which of these problems are you trying to solve? And depending upon which one you clicked, that would then determine the rest of the nurturing sequence, which makes all the sense in the world. So choose your own adventure. Definitely works. And that, that kind of like leads me to what my next question was going to be, which is, you know, we're talking about how to use it in e-commerce and it's so clear to me as a buyer, just the value in having like reminders about things I've looked at or favorited and customized product recommendations. But how do you apply this in B2B? Dan (30:46): Yeah, so B2B. You perfectly teed up my next story, which is great. So this is hysterical that you asked that question. So I'll use the email example because this is really, really simple. And I can't talk about the company name, but they are very large video hosting company. So I can say that. So this video hosting company basically sells a high-end video player that you can put on your website, right? And when you come to their site, let's say, Dan@mcgaw.io, I sign up at that moment in time. We ping a service called Builtwith and Builtwith knows every technology that's on every website on the internet. So we hit Builtwith.com. Builtwith then spits back a payload of all the technologies that are on that website. So very easily, we now know that the company is using Marketo. Hey, we know they have money, right. Dan (31:30): So that's great. But with, they also get all the video streaming they're using. So YouTube is on there. Vimeo was on there, things like that. So when that happens, our marketing automation tool, which was HubSpot, interestingly enough, HubSpot then knows in their first email, after their welcome email, we now need to focus on the value props we have over Vimeo. What do we do that Vimeo does not? What do we do that YouTube does not? And then when that email would go, and it would explain our value props in an order where we knew we were strong and where we knew they were weak, right. So we can actually compete with that. We never once said the creepy, this is where people get wrong with the creepy. We never once said, we know you have Vimeo. Kathleen (32:08): We notice upon stalking your site. Dan (32:12): Yeah. Now in an automated email, you don't want to say that. Now in a sales email not so bad. Right? Cause we automated sales emails. Kathleen (32:20): That just means you've done your homework. Dan (32:21): We didn't do our homework. They were automated. You just thought a person did their homework. Kathleen (32:24): I mean, like when you send a sales email it means you as the sales person have done your homework, if you say, I noticed on your website, X, Y, and Z, like fine. Yeah. Dan (32:32): That's totally fine. Even though automation may have happened. So either way this, these emails were sent out and we were able to increase engagement of the emails. Now, I can't remember, this is nearly five years ago. I don't remember the exact statistics on that, but I do know that we have very good lift on the engagement of those new emails. And then of course, being able to get people to stay involved in the email sequence. And that is a very stereotypical way to get people's attention, leveraging that data enrichment once again, to better personalize, better segment that email for that person. And we were able to get much better engagement out of those emails. And of course, turning into purchases. Kathleen (33:06): It sounds like you could easily get into a territory where you're using a lot of different tools to put these kinds of programs together. And in doing so, data is moving between many different platforms. I mean, like, you know, you talked about using HubSpot and my company, for example, we have HubSpot and Salesforce and those are, you know, just enough work to keep those two systems of record in sync. Do you find that when you get into these areas of, of cobbling together, different systems that you need to put like a customer data platform in place? Or or are you finding that the tools are getting sophisticated enough that they can all talk to each other in a way that keeps them in sync? Dan (33:55): Yeah, really, really good question. So I definitely think so, going back to, I definitely think companies should start out with the right CDP. So a customer data platform is really helpful. And I think the reason why a customer data platform is helpful is not what usually people were thinking of. Segment as an example, which is the biggest CDP in the market. The primary value that Segment started with is that you basically send all of your data to one thing and it distributes that data to everything else. This is a great reduction in developer time, right? So instead of spending five hours implementing this new tracking event or this new thing, I only have to spend maybe a half an hour because I only have to write the code once compared to having to write it 16 times for all these different tools. So that's the, the real initial value of where like the CDP kind of came into place is distribution of that, that stuff. Dan (34:40): Now they do help with integration, but at the same time, you're not going to replace HubSpot and Salesforce's integration. You're still going to need that. A customer data platform does not solve that problem necessarily. It can, but it, it now you're working with some really, really big, expensive CDPs, which just are usually pricing a lot of people, a lot of people out of the market. So in that case, when you're trying to keep two systems up to date, one, a CDP is helpful. Segment is of course going to help us so that you have a live stream of data getting in there, but that's going to be really where you start getting into the place of where you're leveraging tools like Zapier, right? Zapier is going to help keep that stuff together. And there's, there's more enterprise competitors, Zapier like Tray.io or Workado that are becoming really popular. Dan (35:20): If there's also a technology called hull.io and they're beta basically a data orchestration tool. And then if you get super crazy, you leverage tools like Fiveran or funnel.io or Stitch data. These are going to manage large, large, large datasets, but for most people, right, HubSpot and Salesforce, they have a great integration. Right. And just make sure it doesn't break. And then when you're trying to make data get into all these tools, cleanly, that's where a CDP really comes in. But the CDP I would say is higher up the funnel compared to like, where I would say, HubSpot and Salesforce is kind of in the middle. And I would say Zapier is below the funnel. It's interesting. I have an online course, which I always forget that I have this course. Kind of embarrassing. Dan (36:04): I have an online course at cxl.com. So CXLInstitute.com. It's how to build a MarTech stack in like class three, which is also a free webinar on my website. You don't have to buy my course. You can go to my website and get the webinar. We talk about the three types of integration. You have platform side integration, you have service side integration. You have clients that integration, it's important to understand those three and how you build things out as marketers. We're more so using the platform side integration, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, and for anybody out there who says Zapier is Zapier. Kathleen (36:34): That is the GIF v JIF debate of the data world. Dan (36:38): Yeah. When you go talk to the founders and you're talking about it, they're like Zapier makes you happier. And I was like, totally get it. So, I'm doing my service to help them out and get the right name out there. So I always recommend Zapier to try to hook all the things together because you can do some really, really cool stuff with Zapier. Kathleen (36:55): I do feel like though, and I agree with you. I love Zapier. And I've interviewed, I've had a couple of interviews with people like big, big company marketers, but also like teeny tiny dot com company marketers doing unbelievable things with Zapier. Like I interviewed one guy who was pretty much a solopreneur attorney who does his own marketing for his own solo practice. And that guy has like built marketing automation out of Zapier. Like he's, he runs his entire business on it. And the only thing that makes me nervous when I hear stories like that is, I'm like one thing breaks and the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. It's that, that makes me so nervous. Dan (37:33): No, I, I can totally understand that. And that makes me nervous as well. Right? Not going to lie with like running everything through Zapier, but at the same time, I mean, I have over 50, 50 zaps right now, but most of my zaps are like automating my calendar, adding my zoom link to my emails and my Gmails and like my favorite use for Zapier in our company. So when we win a deal, we have to create a Trello board, create a Harvest project, create a Slack channel, inform the sales team. And for the services team, all our sales rep has to do, is move the opportunity to closed won, and everything is automatically created. Everything's handled. And our assistant just goes in and does some polish and it's all automated. So to me, that's really the use case of Zapier is a lot more workflow automation. Kathleen (38:16): Yeah. I would agree with you. All right, well, we're going to switch gears because we could talk about this forever, but we do not have forever? So I want to ask you the two questions I always ask all of my guests. The first one you know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing. Who do you think, either a company or an individual, is really doing great work in the inbound marketing world? Dan (38:39): Yeah. So I thought about this twice, right? So like I had to have two answers, one, I think Segment.com. I know we've talked about them a lot, but Segment has some of the best content on the internet and they do a great job with their inbound stuff. I think they really, really focus on helping people. And it's less on trying to be a it's more altruistic than like, Oh, come to my site so I can hit you with 55 pop-ups. And they just, they really have great content and they cover a lot of different people and it really drives a lot of traffic. And I have to say it, even though I don't want to. So I was the head of marketing at Kissmetrics and I learned a lot about content marketing while at Kissmetrics. I mean, we were the number one digital marketing blog for a long time. Dan (39:16): And we drove a ton of traffic and Sean Work who worked with me. I love that guy, cause he ran the blog for me and did a great job. But Neil Patel, man, I used to work with that guy. Very, very smart, smart gentlemen. He has really figured out the content marketing inbound marketing game, even though sometimes he can be a little slimy and a little creepy, I guess, because he's super pushy. He's a great guy, like personally, like, I know Neil. Like he's one of the only people that I still see at conference circuits. How's your wife, how the kids, right? Like just such a, I don't know, maybe I'm on his good side, but he's a good guy, but he's just really, really talented at inbound marketing. And the Neil Patel blog just sucks up the internet. Like just honestly sucks up the internet, whether you want to get there or not. If you search for anything in marketing, you're going to wind up with the Neil Patel blog posts in the top page, like on the first page. So I've got to hand it to him. Kathleen (40:05): Yeah. It's it's funny. Neil Patel is one of those marketers that, that I feel like is polarizing in an interesting way because people either love his stuff or they really, really don't. Like when I ask this question, I've had a lot of people say, you know, Neil Patel, but then I've also interviewed people who, who are like, not Neil Patel. Yeah. I mean, but I, I think that's great. Like I've always said, if everybody loves you, you're definitely doing something wrong because you're not like, you're not putting your stake in the ground hard enough. Dan (40:36): His company LLC is I'm a big deal LLC. Right? So like, just gives you an idea of his character. And I have no room to talk at all because Neil and I got along great. My company name before it was Mcgaw.io Was called F'in Amazing right. Because that's just me, Kathleen (40:54): Which I love. I, when I saw that on your your bio, I was like, Oh, I really liked that name. Dan (41:00): Yeah. And I'm bummed that we had to change it, but Oh man, since we changed the company name and we've doubled in size, like it's just, we should have changed years ago. But at the end of the day Neil has his persona. He lives his persona. And I mean, he's making millions of dollars. Right? So like that for him, you don't have to like Ian Lopez or whatever that guy is that's on YouTube making $400 million a year, but he's making, I should say 400 billion a year. I think his networks is like 400 million or something now. You don't have to like him. Take the money. Kathleen (41:34): That's great. All right. Second question. And particularly interested in your answer because of what you do. A lot of the marketers I talked to express that one of their challenges is that the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly that it's like, you know, keeping up with the pace of technological change in particular, it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. You are very immersed in marketing technology. So how do you keep up with all of it? Dan (42:02): Yeah. I I'm so bummed for the answer that I have to give here. Cause I am like the last person to do innovation. Right. So I am against the hipsters. Right. So everybody's like, let's sign up for Webflow and I'm like, no, like I'll wait three more years. I'm good with WordPress. Like I don't need to change my solution. Kathleen (42:17): You're not the guy camping out in front of the Apple store when the new iPhone comes out. Dan (42:22): Hell no, I didn't get it. I wasn't. I was like the last person that I knew that was on Facebook. Now, when I think about like, I'm using, I've been using Segment for nine years, so naturally I'm on the bleeding edge of some technologies, but it's very, very rare that that really happens. And I actually did not become a fan boy of Segment until about four years ago. Like I advise my clients against it until about four years ago. And I wait, I'm the early majority. When you think about Crossing the Chasm, but where do I get my information? That's what really, what we wanted to ask first, LinkedIn, I get probably 75 to 85% of my stuff from my LinkedIn. I follow everybody. I don't use Twitter too much. My feed is really from LinkedIn. I follow a lot of really, really important people. Dan (43:02): I connect with everybody. I mean, I have 25,000 connections, but I follow a lot of smart people. So I get their updates and then that's going to be where I get most of my news. That being said my team keeps me probably up to date with a lot of the crazy technologies because they're interfacing with our clients and our clients are actually the ones that exposed me the most to new tech. Now what's sad is I have to tell most of my clients, no, we're not doing that. Like that's just too hipster, bro. And for every one of my clients now that has Webflow, I always tickle them and make fun of them and tell them you're a hipster. Let me get you those new glasses. So like I always push back on brand new technology because the internet doesn't work with it. Dan (43:41): And the key example that I always try to, if anybody has ever worked with a single page application, a Spa app, anything that's React, Angular or whatever, the other JavaScript technology. And you had your website built today. When everybody started doing those things, they lost all their SEO. They lost all of their analytics. They lost all of their tracking. They lost all of the things and they all of a sudden had to go my, Oh my God, Oh my God, nothing works. Dan, let me give you 50 grand to fix this. And I was like, sure, I'll take your money. Right. But why did you have to move to the single page application? Because you were a hipster. If you would've stuck with the, the legacy stuff that would've worked just fine, you would have saved yourself a bunch of money. So I just pushed back and say, sometimes I don't care about staying on the cutting edge. I actually like being old and lame. Kathleen (44:23): I'm right there with ya. You stick with what works, right. Dan (44:27): If it's not broke, just maintain it. Kathleen (44:32): All right, well that brings us to the end of the interview. So before we wrap up, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about you or connect with you, ask a question, check out some of the resources you've mentioned, what's the best way for them to do that? Dan (44:48): Yeah. So what I would recommend is you're going to want to go to this website called utm.io, right? Go to utm.io, sign up for a free account. And I'm going to personally email you and say, what's up. And then you can directly communicate back with me. Now I tell you this because I'm of course shamelessly plugging my product, UTM dot IO. And I want to talk to you about how you use UTMs. But that is definitely one of the best ways, I'm on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn. That's usually where everybody hangs out with me is on LinkedIn, but I don't want to miss out. We messed up this whole creepy text thing. Kathleen (45:18): Well, we're waiting for the second. Dan (45:20): We'll text you. There's a, there's now a, it used to say, it will not text you again in one minute, but now the rule has been changed to one hour. So I got an error notification saying someone with this number tried to text in and we can't text them back because it happened, the same message we sent to them one hour ago. Kathleen (45:39): So tonight I'm going to send one. There you go. I'm going to make this work. Dan (45:45): And in your next podcast, you're going to update everybody. So you've got to not only listen to this podcast, but the next one to find out. Kathleen (45:50): Right. Stay tuned for part two. I love it. I love it. And if you're listening, make sure that when you test it, you put a space after your email address to see if your phone is going to auto-correct your address before you hit send. I did not do that, which caused the entire problem. So user error, you can't, you know, there's nothing you can do about that. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me, Dan. This is awesome. We are wrapping up now and if you're listening and you liked this episode, enjoyed what you heard, learned something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. That is how other people find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I'd love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Dan. Dan (46:41): Thank you for having me. Great to meet everybody.

Colin and Brent discuss the story of BuiltWith, working with a VA, building, boting, or buying.Reach out to Colin Keeley and Brent Sanders on Twitter with any feedback. Publish and sell your audio courses on AvocadoAudio.com. 

In this episode I mention some of the tools, methods and strategies that you can use to spy on your competition and outperform them. It's important to understand what competitors in your industry are using in terms of technology, their marketing campaigns, social media presence and if possible their numbers.Some of the tools I have mentioned in the episode include BuiltWith, SEMrush, Facebook Ad Library, Social Media, Podcast & Youtube. Get more information from www.siftgroup.net or send me an email to augustine@siftgroup.net also if you want you or your business to be featured on the show.Rate, Review & Share the episode to support the show. Thank you for tuning in!Until next time !Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

In episode no. 27 of "Voice of Digital Abhi", I will share my experience of Digital Marketing Internship with Indus Eximtech Pvt. Ltd. But before starting I need to share a couple of things about the internship. I started the internship on May 18, 2020. Initially, the internship was for 2 months. - But then with mutual agreement, the internship was extended for 3 more months. Also, I’m still doing this internship at the time of creating this episode. I have shared: About Indus Eximtech My Role in the company About the Work Profile Day to Day tasks (Keyword Research, Competition Research, SEO Audit, Website Audit, Market Research, Market Assessment) Tools used during the Digital Marketing Internship (Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Google Ads, BuiltWith, WhatRuns, Google My Business, Streak) My Experience - Watch this episode on YouTube: Digital Marketing Internship | My Experience with Indus Eximtech Pvt Ltd - https://youtu.be/4DHd230shY4 - Links to my Social Profiles: Blog: https://digitalabhi.com/blog/ Instagram: https://instagram.com/digitalabhi_ YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/digitalabhi/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/digitalabhi__ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalabhi0/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/digitalabhi0/ Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/722817831173075/ Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Abhishek-Sharma-4495 - Connect with me socially so that I can help you out there also with queries related to Digital Marketing. Also, stay tuned to Digital Abhi for more content related to Digital Marketing. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/digitalabhi/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/digitalabhi/support

Show Resources: Find which companies use competitors' products: Datanyze.com BuiltWith.com Episodes we referenced: Ep 10 - What should you offer from your LinkedIn Ads? Ep 15 - Benchmarking Your LinkedIn Ads Ep 17 - LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads - Should You Use Them? Ep 27 - Agile Testing For Your LinkedIn Ads Management Ep 29 - LinkedIn Ads Saturation - Are you experiencing it? Ep 30 - LinkedIn Ads Newest Features and Future Roadmap LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: You ask, we answer. The great Q&A episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show coming right atcha. Buckle up. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. A huge thank you to all you who submitted questions for our first Q&A episode. You certainly didn't throw any softballs. So you're about to get an eclectic mix of some of the most challenging issues that you'll face on LinkedIn Ads. A quick dip into the reviews. Raul Hernandez Ochoa says "best in class. AJ delivers real value from experience, love the actionable insights." Raul, thank you so much for saying that. I trust your opinion more than almost anyone out there. For those who don't know, Raul hosts the #DoGoodWork podcast, and he is the master of systems and productivity. So he's definitely worth listening to and following. And then Felicia Gheorghe, who's a paid social pro at a company called DHI in Copenhagen says, "Good stuff. Probably the best podcast on the interwebs. Hands on and no generic advice. Love it. Thank you, AJ Wilcox, for making this happen." Felicia, I don't know that I would agree that it is the best podcast on the interwebs. But heck, yeah, I'll take it. I would absolutely love to feature you. So please leave a review wherever you tend to review things and I'd love to shout you out and feature you here. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. Leonardo Bellini, from Italy, says my question is this one, "Which is the best trade off between available budget and campaigns granularity? If I have, let's say, a 5000 euro budget, does it make sense to split the budget into say four campaigns?" I know you're a big fan of running more campaigns in parallel using different audience targeting options. And Leonardo, this is a great one because I am a huge fan of splitting up audiences into smaller segments so that I can learn something. I treat each small segment like a private focus group that no one else can see. But if we break up too granularly, we definitely end up hitting some roadblocks. For instance, each campaign has to have a minimum $10 or 10 euro budget for the day, if you break your audience up into two smaller groups, each one could spend $10 or 10 euro per day, which is $300, or 300 euro. And if I take a look at a campaign after it's spent $300, or 300 euro, my reaction is honestly going to be well, that is not enough data to actually tell what's going on. So I need this to run longer. And then at the same time, if you take your 5,000 euro budget, and you break that up into 20 campaigns, just at the minimum of 10 euro per day, you're going to overspend your budget by twice. So breaking up too small really does have its disadvantages. I like to shoot for about $1,000 per month or 1,000 euro per campaign. So if a budget is $5k, I'd probably do about five campaigns max. And then when budgets get into the $100k range, the six figures, I'll go a little bit further, we can do 100 to 150 campaigns pretty easily. But don't take these numbers as an absolute constraint. We run campaigns all the time with 300 people in them. So it just depends on whether or not it's worth your time to manage a small audience and realize that it's probably going to have to run longer than just a single month to gain any learnings from it. And of course, if you're working with an agency like ours, who cares, you know, make us manage tiny little campaigns. That's what we're here for. 3:33 Georgiana Dumitru says, "Great opportunity, AJ, so I'm taking advantage of it. I would like to know if you ever build up campaigns for a B2C client and that it generated results? Thanks!" And Georgiana, this is a great question because I get asked about B2C all the time. The big challenge with LinkedIn Ads is it's expensive, and it's also more middle of funnel. And those two things don't lend themselves very well if you're let's say selling handbags or or you have some kind of e commerce product. So most of the time, I'm picturing B2B when I'm talking about LinkedIn Ads. But we have found quite a few B2C use cases where it tends to work quite well. We've seen things like coaching programs, which that's technically B2C. You're training professional, but it's the money coming out of their own wallet for that training. We found hiring and recruiting, obviously, that's kind of LinkedIn is bread and butter that works quite well. We've seen things in financial services. We even had a helicopter transport company like the Uber of helicopters work extremely well. Some of the most efficient campaigns we've ever seen. We've seen travel higher ed, all of these things work. So in general, yeah, I think B2C isn't the best fit, but there are certainly pockets and good use cases where it does make sense. 4:50 Chris Dickson asks, "What's your best solution for retargeting competitors and their customers?" Oh, Chris, you're speaking my language here. If you're advertising on something like Twitter, This is really easy. You just target the followers of your competitors Twitter handle, and now you have access to their followers, their users, and people who like them, it makes a lot of sense. But on LinkedIn, we can't target company page followers. In fact, unless you are the company page owner, you can't even see who your followers are. So some of the ways that we go about this, you can take a look at services like Datanyze and BuiltWith.com And what they do is they crawl the web, they look at the different tags, the marketing tags, and JavaScript on companies' websites that tell which products they're using. And then they go on the back end and say, Okay, cool. It looks like IBM is using Marketo. Great, and they compile this list. So if your competitor is a company who installs JavaScript, tracking tags on people's websites, then you could go and buy a report from someone like Datanyze and BuiltWith and just get a list of here's all the the people who are customers of this competitor. And then you could take that list and upload it as a matched audience, and show ads just to the relevant roles of those companies. I think this works extremely well. I'm a big fan. Something else you could do is go and find out if LinkedIn has a skill around either the competitors name, or the names of their products. And if you can target people who have that skill, and then maybe subtract current and past employees because they would obviously have that skill too. That might get you practitioners who use your competitors' software or service. Something else you could do, go to the company's page, scroll down to where their posts start, and click on the ads filter. And then you'll get to see some of their ads, actually, the last six months worth of sponsored content ads that they're running, and click through on some of them and look and see what the UTM parameters are, as they're sending you to their landing page. In some of those UTM parameters, you might see some clues about how their targeting, or what kind of campaign this is. And that could give you some interesting insight into how to counteract them, or one of them. 7:10 Daniel Borba says "video ads on LinkedIn, any and all questions around that topic". Yeah, this definitely seems like it should be a whole episode. But I'll touch on this one too. Video is really tough on LinkedIn. And it's a lot better now that we have this engagement retargeting so we can start to do sequences, and you can do storytelling. The basics of why video ads are tough to make work on LinkedIn is, number one, they're expensive. And number two, anytime you have a video ad, there's inherently two calls to action. The first is going to be watch this video. And the second is going to be take some kind of action that we're going to ask you after. And of course, you as sophisticated advertisers know, the more things we ask of our prospects, the less likely they're going to be to do it or the more people we're going to have dropped out of that process. And of course, they're not inexpensive. LinkedIn has an opportunity cost when they show a sponsored content ad, they know that that is worth probably $8 to $11 per click. And so when you show video, they have to charge enough that they're still going to get the same or more from that inventory. And because the video now has two calls to action, it's inherently going to get less interaction, meaning that your cost per is going to increase. So I will do a whole episode on video ads. But here's a basic strategy. Most don't know this, but with video ads, you can bid cost per view, or cost per impression. Of course, that's the only two options you get if you set the video views objective, but you can also bid by cost per click if that's within a website visits or a lead generation objective campaign. So I'm a big fan of start by bidding cost per click with video just to take the risk away, test out your creative, and then switch to cost per view or cost per impression where it makes sense, if you can get your costs down because engagement so high. Make sure your videos have a lot of action within the first two seconds, because that's all you get to grab people. And then make sure you've got a good thumbnail especially for those slower internet connections who can't see that action. Give them something good to look at. And your subtitles have to be either burned in or uploaded as .srt files because 80% of the viewers will watch with the sound off so it's got to look good with the sound off. 9:25 Guadalupe Molina says "I need to demystify what is a click. When I put website clicks as an objective and create an ad that links to a website article and I bid by cost per click, every time the money is spent, does that mean that a click goes to the website? Or can it mean that I'm bidding for any type of click, just as clicking on my brand logo, etc.? I cannot find this answer anywhere." And Guadalupe you are in luck. I actually have an episode about objectives coming out very soon. So watch for that. But this is definitely where objectives get complex because if your objective If is set as engagement, engagement means any click so you're going to get charged if you're bidding by cost per click for likes, comments shares, a follow to your company page, a click to your company page, or a click to your landing page. So if you're bidding by engagement, yeah, you're going to pay for everything. The nice thing is though, the engagement is about 35% cheaper. So if your ads are getting pretty much only clicks to your landing page, engagements are a cool hack of being able to pay less for your clicks. But if you choose website visits or conversion, then what LinkedIn calls a click is only a click to your landing page. So if you open up your analytics, and you see that LinkedIn reports 20 clicks, but analytics only sees 16, what happens there is yeah, you paid for 20 clicks because LinkedIn technically sent them, but for people of that 20 dropped out or left or whatever before the page was finished loading. A lot of times this has to do with your page load speed. Especially because pages just take longer to load on mobile. So it's definitely worthwhile to make sure your landing pages load fast for mobile, so that people don't get bored of waiting for it to load and end up leaving. If your objective is lead generation, a click is when they open the form. So we'll go a lot deeper into that one in a future episode, a very near future episode, but Guadalupe thanks for asking that. 11:25 And then Kristine Sergejeva has asked several different questions. Thank you, Kristine, I'm so excited to have these. She asks, "Can GIFs be used as LinkedIn ads?" And that would be like an animated GIF. Unfortunately, no, you have to convert that to a video and use it as a video ad if you want to use it on LinkedIn. I've tried animated GIFs in about every way I can think of. I even turned an animated GIF into a ping. So LinkedIn would accept it and still it doesn't play the animation even though it does everywhere else on the web. She also asks, "I still do not have clarity, when and how much I have to increase the bid, if I start with the lowest bid." And this is going with AJ's strategy of bid the very minimum, don't plan on actually spending your budget and you just want to minimize your cost per lead. So she says, "Will a higher bid also increase my click through rate or only impressions, or it depends?". So Kristine, this is definitely one of those cases where it depends on a lot of different factors, but we'll break them down here. How much you increase your bid or decrease really depends on the speed that you need to know at. So for instance, if you're at the beginning of the month, and you have a whole month to spend the budget, you might want to increase by 10 or 20 cent increments until you start to see traffic come through that's meaningful. But if you're in a rush, let's say you're four days before the end of the month, and you've got a budget to spend, then you might move by whole dollars, you might increase by $1 or $2 and just see. The goal is to find that point at which you are bidding the least possible to still spend your budget. And whether you find that by incrementally slowly decreasing from the minimum, or starting at the minimum, bouncing high, and then backing it back to somewhere in the middle, the goal is just to eventually find that point of efficiency. And then to your second point here, yes, raising your bid can increase your click through rate. But I definitely wouldn't count on it all the time. What happens is, if your ad is towards the top of the feed, it's going to generally get clicked on a lot more than one that is further down the feed. So if your ad is in the first position, which is the second post on someone's feed, then it'll likely get five or 10 times the click through rate if it were in the second ad position, which is like seven posts down the page. But what happens is if your ad is performing well, if it's getting a high click through rate, even if you're not bidding very much so LinkedIn wouldn't want to put you at the top. But if your ads get clicked on a lot, there's really high engagement, then they're motivated to continue to put you at the top, even though you're not bidding a whole lot. So really the key here is having really good performing ads. And then you can get it to where you are bidding very low, but still showing near the top of the feed and getting a nice high click through rate. But of course, when you increase your bid, you will definitely increase your impressions. And this is because you are making yourself more competitive in the auction, therefore winning more auction, therefore winning more auctions for impressions, so you will definitely see more impressions. But watch what happens to your click through rate. If you're bidding CPM, you will definitely see a change in in click through rates as you bid up and down. And that's because a direct CPM bid totally affects whether you show up in the first position, or the eighth position, which would be like 50 something slots down. Christine also says "I had this bad experience, that each change that I make to a campaign, makes the campaign's performance worse. Have you noticed this or is it just me? Is it just for sure period of time while the platform is adjusting to the requested change?" And Kristine, I haven't found this to be the case. But I also wouldn't be surprised if this is actually saturation. So go back and listen to Episode 29, if you haven't already all about saturation. Because when you're experiencing saturation, something that worked before, is just going to continue performing worse and worse. And it acts like a stair step pattern, where your click through rates will fall gradually and slowly. But you will dip down in chunks as you drop in your relevancy score, and start losing auctions quicker. It also could be the message or the offer. So don't count those out. And remember that the best audience doesn't mean that performance will be great. And what I mean by that is if you are narrowing your audience to more of the right people, it doesn't mean that you'll see performance increase necessarily, but it does mean that the lead quality that you generate from those should be better. So I wouldn't count on this turning around by itself, I would suggest holding your audiences consistent. So define who the right audiences are and then test different messaging and offers against them until you see performance pop back up. And ideally stay for, you know, at least two or three weeks before you have to refresh anything. Then Kristine asks, "Is it normal that after I paused the campaign and then activated again, it takes like a day for the campaign to activate and starts with very few impressions." And Kristine back in like 2012. LinkedIn used to claim that if you pause the campaign and then reactivated it, that it would reset your relevancy score. And so there'd be this learning curve that your ads and campaign have to go through again, before they really went back to normal. Now, even since, like 2012, when I heard this, I've done a lot of pausing and unpause in campaigns. And I have never actually seeing this occur. So I kind of think that it's not true. And maybe that was just LinkedIn not wanting us to pause campaigns, so they continue making money. I don't know. But what I find is the learning curve that Facebook advertisers go through is really crazy. I mean, it's to the point where if you double your budget overnight, it's like your whole account freaks out and it takes several days for the algorithm to catch up and go back to performing well. When you launch new ads, it'll take quite a while for performance to kick in. And I'm actually really grateful because LinkedIn users, we don't really go through that. When we launch a new campaign. When we increase bids. When we increase budgets, we don't see a giant shake up like you'd see on something like Facebook. When we launch new ads, it's normal for LinkedIn to show impressions for a day, a day and a half for it to get a feel for relevancy score, and then kind of go to its normal cadence. But even that learning that LinkedIn goes through is usually pretty kind. It's giving really solid impressions, usually in pretty good inventory. So I actually really like that first testing period for ads. So I haven't found that to be the case that pausing and unpausing campaigns really negatively affects them. It could be a relevancy score issue. So I would try changing up your ads, changing up your offers, and just see if you can get something with a high relevancy score that isn't necessarily swayed too much, especially as saturation occurs. Along the same lines, she asks, "Have you noticed that normally for the first week of the campaign, it can perform really well, even with very low bids. But then starting from the second week, the platform seems to be just doing everything to push you to increase the bids." Now, it is very possible that LinkedIn is purposely trying to trick you into raising your bids and disincentivizing you from bidding low, but I really only see this happening when my ads aren't getting a great click through rate. So if you're around average, or maybe slightly above or even below, I could see this happening as your relevancy score is dropping. What you get is lackluster performance, plus saturation when people have already seen your ads, and they start clicking at a lower rate. And then as your relevancy score drops, you need to increase your bids to stay competitive in the auction and get LinkedIn to keep showing them. So that's probably what you're experiencing. But if you can play with messaging and offers to the point where you're getting like, .7, .8%, click through rates. Usually this isn't an issue. 19:22 And Sean Possemato asks, "What kind of data does the insights tag give you from your website visitors if you're not running LinkedIn ads?" So what Shawn is referring to is the free website demographics that anyone can get by opening up a LinkedIn Ads account and installing the insight tag on their website. You don't have to spend a dime. And it's kind of like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics, where the platform is showing you what they can see from your website traffic. And this is great, I recommend everyone do this, whether or not you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, or whether or not you're even B2B. There are reporting that you'll see from this are things like job function, title of the people who are visiting your website, their company names. It's like the last 20 companies or maybe the most interactive 20 companies, industry, seniority, company size, location, country or region and even county. And as a bonus here, if you've set up website retargeting segments, you can also break down all of your website demographics by these segments. So for instance, create a retargeting segment, even if you don't plan to advertise to them, of just people who've filled out your forms and made it to thank you pages, or maybe just people who visit the Contact Us page. And then you'll get to see the titles, the securities, companies of people who made it to those pages. And I think that's really powerful information. In Episode 30, we mentioned that this feature is going to be getting a nice boost coming up soon. So I'm expecting a lot more information, but as of right now, it's those whatever seven or eight different dimensions that you can break your traffic down by. And they will tell you traffic percentage. So what percentage of the job function of business development has been on your page, but they're not going to show you click through rates or anything in more detail because they didn't originate that traffic. They don't know what actions people took to get there, or anything like that. 21:20 And Raul Hernandez Ochoa, the same one who left the review, so thank you, Raul. He asks, "Are there click to message ads coming to LinkedIn, like on Facebook?" And for those of you who don't know, click to message ads on Facebook, what they do is they drive traffic directly into Facebook Messenger, where you can have a more powerful chat bot experience for that prospect. And truthfully, I don't know, conversation ads on LinkedIn are really LinkedIn's first foray into that chat bot experience. And I know there's a lot of directions that they could take this. Partner integrations into things like MobileMonkey and WeChat, but we don't know where that is on their roadmap or their list of priorities. I would say that if conversation ads as an ad format performs really well, they'll probably try to make it more powerful and do something like this with it in the future, but truthfully, I don't know. 22:12 And Biswarup Banerjee says, "How has the corona related crisis affected the ad spend on LinkedIn by companies?" And we did see a lot of big companies pull back spend during that first period of economic uncertainty. We also saw a lot of small advertisers quit entirely. And the effect that we saw, this looks like it caused costs per click to drop by five or 10%. And I had friends telling me that Facebook prices had dropped 10 to 30, maybe even 40%. I even had a friend who invests heavily in YouTube ads tell me that prices dropped to like a seventh of where they were, which is incredible, but it looks by now that most companies have really kind of gone back to normal, or at least close to normal. We also see a lot of new entrants into LinkedIn Ads because of budget that they had set aside for things like trade shows and conferences aren't happening anymore. And that budget needs to go somewhere. And I'm so glad that those budgets are going into digital. Lots of companies coming into the 21st century. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the Q&A 23:17 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 23:26 If reducing your cost per lead, and increasing your LinkedIn Ads scale is your goal. B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, managing the largest accounts at scale, and getting the lowest costs. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, so you know, we're doing something right. fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns, or heck, contact us through morse code, or no matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure that we make you the hero. 23:59 All right, let's jump back into more Q&A, Chase Gladden, one of the best marketers I know in San Francisco asks, "What would you use as a minimum test budget, as well as what point would you decide a test has received enough impressions spend and conversions to declare a winner?" So number of impressions I don't really care much about, but I find that 100 clicks is a good first test on conversions. At LinkedIn, $8 to $11 cost per click average 100 clicks is going to be $800 to $1,100. dollars. And I would call this sticking your toe in the water because after about 100 clicks, if you've got like one conversion, then you know that it's performing really poorly. And if you've got like 20 conversions, you don't know for sure that you have a 20% conversion rate, just because the data isn't complete yet. But you know, it's performing really well. So after 100 clicks, I know directionally whether or not it's a good offer or good ads. In North America prices. It's usually about $300 in spend before we see click through rates become statistically significant. So if your goal is just to find out what's the message that gets my prospects to engage, you can usually do that after spending about $300 between two different ad variants. If you have a good content offer, check out Episode 10 for going really deep on offers, then it's usually about $5,000 in North American spend before your conversions becomes statistically significant. So if you have a great budget, yeah, I would go at least $5,000 a month, run a significant test every month to the conversion. But if you have less than that, or just need to pivot faster, yeah, you can make these decisions a little bit quicker. 25:41 Anna Phillips asks a good one. She says, "Well, this is probably a better question for someone who works at LinkedIn. But why do you think the ad platform is so behind the times when it comes to customizing data, reporting, comparing different time periods, segmenting by platform device, etc. Like they just added the ability to custom itemized columns and to see frequency metrics maybe a month ago. Do you think there's a specific reason behind this discrepancy between potential and reality? And do you see it getting better in the near future?" This one's definitely going to get me in trouble, but I'll answer completely and honestly, I don't think that LinkedIn had much faith in its ads platform from the very beginning. It's always been really expensive, and LinkedIn still make 60% of its revenue from recruiter. So LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has always really been the redheaded stepchild. I remember early on and LinkedIn Ads when it took two and a half years for them to roll out just a new UI change, because they only have like two developers, and they were both shared with recruiter so they couldn't give the ad platform very much time or attention. And to LinkedIn's credit, in the last few years. It really seems like we've seen LinkedIn realize that it has something truly special and trying to catch up. But of course, it's very far behind. I don't see LinkedIn products team using their own products, unfortunately. And I don't know what this is like in all kinds of different industries. I don't know if product is usually not using their own product. And I'm not sure whether Facebook and Google do this. But I see that as being a core reason why things get released that aren't actually what advertisers want. So I would love to see people who are planning product and roadmap at LinkedIn, actually having advertising experience or actively advertising for a client on the side or something like that, so that they can actually experience their own products. And I think things would come a little bit better ironed out for us. I also think that there's a level of arrogance within the LinkedIn corporation that won't come across when you talk to an individual. When you talk to any of them, they come across as very much wanting the best for their advertisers and listening. But I bet that attitude and arrogance would be palpable in a leadership meeting, and I know that would trickle down to the product. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has done very well as an organization over the last several years with just constant growth. And I think LinkedIn is actually patting themselves on the back for seeing that growth. But I think that growth is actually happening in spite of them and their policies. I think this growth is happening because marketers are getting more sophisticated. We have better tracking and reporting, and attribution technologies that are helping us realize that we have this need for higher quality traffic. We can watch what happens after the initial conversion as it goes through the sales process. And LinkedIn has always had extremely high traffic quality. So I think marketers are turning around, even if LinkedIn thinks that it's their products that are really taking the credit. I honestly think that if LinkedIn really understood what it had, it would work to sprint to become a world class platform. And I think it could be as long as they will use their own product and listen really carefully to customers. And even if LinkedIn really sprints and makes this happen, it's going to be really hard to shake the image that LinkedIn has had for years of being "too expensive and it doesn't work". So right now is where you say. woah AJ, tell us how you really feel. 29:08 Okay, next one's from Laurie Archer, who says, "This one may stump you. I've already reached out to LinkedIn support to have this answered, but they are unable to assist me. I work for a marketing agency, and I have a client who wants me to post ads promoting their products to their page and show up in the newsfeed of their followers. However, I need to use my own credit card for these ads, not theirs, and I don't want them to have access to my credit card. I have campaign manager access to their account. So how can I post ads to a client's page and use my own credit card to purchase them while keeping the number private? Any suggestions would be so helpful." Laurie, this one's not stumping for me at all. In fact, I'm really surprised that LinkedIn couldn't get you an answer on this one. Here's what you'll want to do. Have the client give you account manager access to the account because right now you just have campaign manager and then have them make you the billing admin then you place your credit card in there. Now, the reason why this works, there can be only one billing admin. And only that person can change the credit card and even see the last four digits of it that's on file. And of course, the client can still be account manager access, and account managers can actually change the billing manager. If heaven forbid you got hit by a bus or something, they could still make someone else the account manager. And what happens is, if the client changes to another billing admin, your credit card number would be immediately erased. So there's no concern there at all. The account will just shut off until someone puts a new credit card in. 30:36 Our next one. Stacy Taylor says, "Great, I have a question. I noticed that when building different audience segments, if the audience is small, the estimated costs are higher. Often I end up grouping segments together to keep costs lower, that I would actually prefer to separate out to target the messaging better. Do you have best practices or research on audience size considerations? Do you have best practices research on audience size considerations in relation to the cost and message targeting?" Yes, Stacy, this is totally the case. The smaller your audience size is, the higher you have to bid to be competitive. And I'm not sure what causes this. It's the same thing on Facebook. So it could be something like a smaller audience means that there are other bidders who are targeting larger audiences that you have to outbid for those members. Honestly, it could be artificial, where LinkedIn is just charging you a premium in the auction for being more specific. It could be a smaller audience produces fewer impressions anyway, so we have to bid competitively just to see traffic. And really, it could be all three or none of them. But I find that this can be overcome for the most part with just good efficiency of your ads. A tighter audience means that you can be more specific in your ad copy, which leads to higher click through rates, which lead to an increased relevancy score, allowing you to bid less and still get the same traffic. But sometimes you can't and you end up just having to balance paying, let's say 30 cents to $1 more per click as just the cost of getting data into your silent focus groups. Because that's what these micro campaigns are is just data for you to understand how this segment of the population reacts to what you've shown them. 32:18 And I know I'm absolutely going to butcher this name, but Kaj Robert Karjalainen asks, "What would work best LinkedIn lead gen forms are driving the prospect to a landing page?" And then second part of the question, "Which objective works best with video ads?" So the first one about LinkedIn lead gen forms, Kaj, I've got a great episode for you. Go check out Episode 17 that goes way into more depth about lead gen forms. But basically, I would say if your goal is quality of prospect, send them to your landing page. And if your goal is quantity of number of prospects at the lowest cost, go with the lead gen forms and Episode 17 will explain exactly why. But your secondary part of the question here, you'll want to check out the episode on objectives that's going to come out here in the next few weeks. But like I explained a little earlier, I choose website visits or lead gen so that I can bid cost per click on my video ads to start with. That reduces the risk until I can find out if the ads perform well enough that I can bid by cost per view, or cost per impression and save money there. 33:24 Mayur Katkar says, "Can we put maximum targeting options to increase the lead relevancy?" And I think what Mayur is asking is, can we keep stacking different targeting together to make our audiences more relevant? And yes, you can absolutely do this. And I'm a big fan of it. But like we mentioned here a couple questions ago, the more targeting options that you pile on, the higher your floor price goes. So the more you're going to end up paying. So I only recommend stacking what you would actually find helpful. For instance, if you just want a smaller audience size, I wouldn't put something like like company size or gender or something like that on top of it just to shrink it down, because anything you add is going to increase your floor bid. So only ad targeting that you would actually find helpful and be more core around who your prospect is. 34:15 Okay. Ivy Hou asks, "I'd like to know how to do a budget and conversion forecast for LinkedIn ads as a new channel." Now Ivy, this is absolutely deserving of a whole episode. And so I've added this to my list of content I want to cover. And we'll absolutely do this on forecasting. But check out Episode 27 on agile testing, if you haven't already. This is going to be extremely helpful for you in just seeing the strategy of how I approach something. But here's the general outline of that strategy. I shoot for a $5,000 a month budget if I'm in North America, if I'm targeting outside North America, I can budget less and then within the first $1,000 spent all know about what my conversion rate is. And my conversion rate and my cost per conversion is essentially going to tell me what can I expect from this platform? Is it a total fail? Is it a total win? Or something in between? And then check out Episode 15 on benchmarks. So you can take a look at your cost per click, your click through rates, and your conversion rates along the way to see if you're in line, ahead, or falling behind. And then get ready to pause or revert if you see performance slide. Every new test that you do, take it as that, it's a test and something that could be a bad test. So be willing to revert and say, Ooh, okay, my hypothesis was wrong. Let's go start something else. And you'll definitely want to set internal expectations with your boss, with the board, the CEO, whoever, that this is a pilot and your goal is performance and not just randomly spending an entire budget, whatever that is. I think it would be way better to come in under budget and know that yeah, looks like LinkedIn could be an efficient channel for us, rather than just saying, well, I had a $5,000 budget. So I spent it, but I didn't spend it well, because then you'll look at the performance of that spend after and conclude that LinkedIn is too expensive and doesn't work, which I've heard so many times. It's not even funny. 36:11 Alex Pethick says, "Hey @wilcoxaj, I'm a fan of your podcast. Thanks for all the advice you provide. I'm curious, have you noticed that LinkedIn has removed the ads tab from the company profile pages? Any idea how to see competitors ads now"? Thanks, Alex. Yeah, this one threw me for a loop too. In recent episodes, I've mentioned that I found where that was. You go to the company page, and then just scroll down until you see the ads filter above all the posts, and then you'll still get it. So it's still there, but it just moved. 36:42 Jeffrey Donnelly asks, "Why doesn't the platform allow users to identify their wants and needs and connect advertisers to those wants and needs?" And this is one that I really wish we could do. For the longest time we had search platforms like Google where people were showing their intent, what they wanted and what they were searching for. And then you had platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, where you were showing someone your personal traits. But there wasn't anything that blended the two. When I heard that LinkedIn was up for sale, I was just hoping and praying that Google would buy them so that we would get the world's biggest search intent database, overlaid with the professional trait data that only LinkedIn has. But of course, Microsoft bought them. So I didn't quite get my wish here. I know, they've tried to do this a little bit with interest targeting at least at one point, I don't know if it still does, but it'll take into account someone's Bing search history. So anyone that they know of who's searching on Bing, they can get that intent data. But I'm imagining that's a very small segment of data that probably doesn't influence things all too much. And in Episode 30, we talked about what's coming on the roadmap, and that we're going to get products on pages, which is kind of like a review mechanism. And maybe we'll see, once we have something like that maybe there's a way we can signal interest or desire for a certain class of products. And then advertisers could, let's say, if we're trying to choose a new CRM, we could signal that interest and CRM advertisers would naturally show us more ads. 38:14 Caroline Wyly asks, "I've had good performing ads and some embarrassingly poor performers. With the poor performers, no matter how much budget tweaks, change in copy, audience, etc. Nothing worked. What made it even worse is that it was a lead gen campaign and the few leads that did come through we're not have the right seniority. Not much insight from LinkedIn either." And Caroline, I think this goes down to two different things. Usually, I can trace good ads back to a good offer. So check Episode 10 to learn more about offers. And I can usually trace bad performance back to bad offers. And we face the same challenge where if a client gives us a not very interesting offer, and we're trying to craft ad copy, and creative to try to make that look good, there's only so much lipstick that you can put on a pig trying to make it look pretty. So changing or adjusting the offer trying to get it to where it's providing a lot of potential value to the prospect where it's showing a lot of perceived value to the prospect. Usually those offers will be easy to write high performing ads for and they also help them convert better. But anytime leads come through that don't match my specific targeting. I think that's a completely different issue. So the first thing I would say is check to see, do you have audience expansion enabled on these campaigns? This is the worst offender, because that box is checked by default, you've got to really be vigilant to make sure you're unchecking that. And it allows LinkedIn to stick anyone they want into your existing audience. So that's most likely the case make sure you go and uncheck that. And likely you'll start getting seniority is coming through that actually match your targeting. But this could also be viral traffic. And what happens is anytime in your target audience that someone hits like, comment, or share, it then goes out to their network. And it's not abiding by the targeting that you chose. This usually happens in smaller quantities, it might be like, you got 20 leads, and then you get one that's viral. And then if you see a seniority that doesn't match what you're targeting, but you go, okay, it was only one of 20. It sounds like this is happening to a good percentage of them. So that might not be it. I would also check your targeting and make sure that you're not excluding, rather than including people of seniorities. I've seen that happen a couple times. And also realize that the way that seniority works on LinkedIn, people can have multiple seniorities. So it could be that you're targeting, let's say, VPS. And LinkedIn thinks that they are a VP at one role, but then they're an individual contributor at another that could happen to. You might want to check your definition of what LinkedIn considers senorities to be versus yours. Like for instance, I would look at a doctor or an attorney who runs their own office or practice and I would say, oh, they're probably owner, partner, C-level, some kind of mix of those. But then I look in LinkedIn and LinkedIn calls them directors. So be aware that maybe what you call a certain seniority might not be what LinkedIn calls them. 41:12 And Efrat Dekel asks, "What's the minimum list size I can use in practice in LinkedIn website retargeting ads?" Efrat, you need at least 300 people that LinkedIn has identified within the last 180 days. So that's the absolute minimum. Although I would say if you're advertising to any audience that only has 300 people in it, you might as well not run it, because that's not going to produce very many leads. Although, of course, I'm sure that targeting is going to be great. And the caveat here is that LinkedIn needs to actually identify these people. So let's say you have 600 visitors to your website, but 100 of those aren't LinkedIn members. So LinkedIn wouldn't be able to identify them, so they're not going to make it into your audience. And then let's say half of that traffic, is using an iOS device like iPhone or iPad, or Safari browser or Mozilla. And so they make it into the audience, but then their browser just throws the cookie out. And now they're no longer part of that audience. So you might find that even though you sent 600 people, LinkedIn still saying you're too small to actually advertise to these people, because you're under the 300 person limit. In practice, usually need to send six or 700 people to your website before this becomes large enough to use. 42:27 All right question by Annie Rose. She says, "Most of the times my ads I create in LinkedIn are incomplete due to strict violations. I would love to know what the most common mistakes and intermediate advertiser would commit in building a LinkedIn Ad, and what are the do's and don'ts?" Annie, this is truly deserving of its own episode, and I'm going to make that happen. We want to do something on policies, procedures, and what happens when you get disapproved. But here are a couple of nuggets to chew on in the meantime. Every ad at LinkedIn is human reviewed. Sometimes it's up front and you might see you're waiting four to 24 hours for your ads to be approved before they start running. But sometimes they go live immediately. And that review is done after the fact. And you would only see this happening if your ads were live. And then they spent a little bit of money and then got disapproved later. We've had ads rejected for things like being related to COVID. Dealing with initial coin offerings like crypto related things, advertising alcohol, using excessive punctuation, mentioning LinkedIn in the ad copy will get you disapproved. And also, we found this is not an explicit podcast. So I'll say any swears worse than the a word will get disapproved. Sometimes if you get something disapproved, you can get it by by just resubmitting because it can be a very subjective thing whether or not someone thinks that this infringes on a policy. The other thing you can do is you could try posting organically, and then just boost that organic post since most of the time boosted posts don't go through the same review process, at least from my experience. 44:02 Okay, last question here from Glenn Schmelzle, who's a good friend, he asks, "Do you compare the incumbents click through rate to the click through rate before saturation, or after when you're doing AB testing?" So this is a little bit complex. When you start running an ad, it's probably going to have a high click through rate at some point. And then over time, as people have seen it before, you'll see click through rate slide and start to perform worse. So he's asking when you're running an AB test, let's say you leave the winner from before and you test something new. And then you compare that A and B. Do you compare B's click through rate or cost per click with the click through rate when A very first started, or now after it's saturated a little bit? And this is a brilliant question. My answer is absolutely before because when an ad very first launches, you really get a feel for what that ad is capable of, how interesting it is. And saturated. can be affected by so many things like how active an audience is, or how long you've been running it. So I think the statistics you should care about are definitely before. However, I wouldn't suggest launching something new against something that's old. Because what happens is the thing that is new, LinkedIn looks at that as a risk, because it doesn't know how that new ads going to perform, but it does know the old one. So it's safer to keep running something that's old, not performing well, then testing something that's new and could potentially be a great performer, or it could be terrible. So what I suggest doing, if you have a winner from your AB test, go ahead and pause your whole A and your B and then recreate your A along with your new B. Then both ads and LinkedIn's eyes are brand new, and they're both going to get compared side by side properly. 45:52 And guys, I had so many more Q&A questions for you, but we're already going on too long. So I'm going to save these for our next Q&A episode that might be in, let's say 20 or 30 episodes, so keep sending in your questions, I'd love to feature you. Alright, here comes the episode resources for you. So stick around. 46:15 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 46:26 I mentioned several great resources throughout this episode. So check them out down below in the show notes. There was Datanyze and BuiltWith that are really good for finding out which companies use certain products. I also mentioned a whole bunch of episodes like Episode 10, Episode 17. If you're not already caught up, definitely go back and listen to those those are absolute gems. And if you're new to LinkedIn Ads, the best course that you can take is the one that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's called advertising on LinkedIn. You can't miss it. There's a chubby ginger dude pointing at you smiling, that's me. And all I can say is the price is right. I think it's $25 for the course, if you're not already a LinkedIn premium member and get it for free. And it's the same information that I would teach you, if you hired me for $500/hour to train your team one on one. So I highly recommend that one. Next, make sure you're subscribed to this show, look down, hit the subscribe button if it's not already hit. And do rate the podcast because I want anyone who sees this and is considering to give it a listen. And then please do review it. Every review helps and I totally want to shout you out. So whatever podcast player or service you use, leave a review for the show and I'd love to read it out. As always, email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any show ideas, suggestions, feedback, or topics we should cover. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Translating your strategy into technical requirements, engaging with community platform vendors, and negotiating the best deal. Pre-Show: Brian doesn’t have COVID-19 Resource: Community Launch Guide Platform Vendor Selection: Brian’s twitter thread on vendor selection Builtwith.com Feverbee’s community platform comparison tool Resource: Platform Vendor Scorecard Sponsored by: Vanilla cloud-based customer community software. Drive loyalty, grow sales, and reduce service cost The Localist event platform aggregates, automates and analyzes all of your events, so you can grow your community

In episode #1461, we give you a step-by-step checklist for spying on your competition’s marketing. There are great tools for seeing what your competitors are getting up to in terms of their content, SEO, and ads, which allows you to stay ahead of the curve. Tune in to hear what kinds of things you want to be on the lookout for when spying on your competition!  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: A Step-by-Step Checklist to Spying on Your Competition’s Marketing.  [00:34] Hear why it is important to spy on your competition’s marketing.  [01:00] You can also benefit from seeing what indirect competitors are getting up to.  [01:04] Examples of the kinds of things to look at when spying on advertising campaigns.  [01:55] BuiltWith and Wayback Machine will show you what technology people are using.  [02:26] Use Social Blade to see the growth rate of various channels.  [02:45] A list of tools that will show you what others are doing in terms of content and SEO. [03:11] SimilarWeb shows referring websites and the breakdown of traffic.  [03:41] Google Alters will notify you every time your competition does something new.   [04:01] If you are in the tech world, check out Crunchbase to follow news about competitors.  [04:21] That’s it for today! [04:22] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information or text us on 310-349-3785!   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:   ClickFunnels Adbeat BuiltWith Wayback Machine  Social Blade Ahrefs SEMrush Ubersuggest BuzzSumo SimilarWeb Crunchbase   Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #1461, we give you a step-by-step checklist for spying on your competition's marketing. There are great tools for seeing what your competitors are getting up to in terms of their content, SEO, and ads, which allows you to stay ahead of the curve. Tune in to hear what kinds of things you want to be on the lookout for when spying on your competition!  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: A Step-by-Step Checklist to Spying on Your Competition's Marketing.  [00:34] Hear why it is important to spy on your competition's marketing.  [01:00] You can also benefit from seeing what indirect competitors are getting up to.  [01:04] Examples of the kinds of things to look at when spying on advertising campaigns.  [01:55] BuiltWith and Wayback Machine will show you what technology people are using.  [02:26] Use Social Blade to see the growth rate of various channels.  [02:45] A list of tools that will show you what others are doing in terms of content and SEO. [03:11] SimilarWeb shows referring websites and the breakdown of traffic.  [03:41] Google Alters will notify you every time your competition does something new.   [04:01] If you are in the tech world, check out Crunchbase to follow news about competitors.  [04:21] That's it for today! [04:22] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information or text us on 310-349-3785!   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   ClickFunnels Adbeat BuiltWith Wayback Machine  Social Blade Ahrefs SEMrush Ubersuggest BuzzSumo SimilarWeb Crunchbase   Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

Today we give you a step-by-step checklist for spying on your competition’s marketing. There are great tools for seeing what your competitors are getting up to in terms of their content, SEO, and ads, which allows you to stay ahead of the curve. Tune in to hear what kinds of things you want to be on the lookout for when spying on your competition!  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: A Step-by-Step Checklist to Spying on Your Competition’s Marketing.  [00:34] Hear why it is important to spy on your competition’s marketing.  [01:00] You can also benefit from seeing what indirect competitors are getting up to.  [01:04] Examples of the kinds of things to look at when spying on advertising campaigns.  [01:55] BuiltWith and Wayback Machine will show you what technology people are using.  [02:26] Use Social Blade to see the growth rate of various channels.  [02:45] A list of tools that will show you what others are doing in terms of content and SEO. [03:11] SimilarWeb shows referring websites and the breakdown of traffic.  [03:41] Google Alters will notify you every time your competition does something new.   [04:01] If you are in the tech world, check out Crunchbase to follow news about competitors.  [04:21] That’s it for today! [04:22] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information or text us on 310-349-3785!   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:   ClickFunnels Adbeat BuiltWith Wayback Machine  Social Blade Ahrefs SEMrush Ubersuggest BuzzSumo SimilarWeb Crunchbase   Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

Un análisis más allá de los fríos datos respecto a la realidad del sector.https://www.danielprimo.io/podcast/125100 envíos del newsletter, ¡Apúntate para el 101!https://www.danielprimo.io/newsletterSíguenos en:- Zona Premium: https://www.danielprimo.io/nivel- Curso gratis: https://www.danielprimo.io/cursogratis- Twitter: https://twitter.com/webreactiva- Telegram: https://t.me/webreactiva

Un análisis más allá de los fríos datos respecto a la realidad del sector.https://www.danielprimo.io/podcast/125100 envíos del newsletter, ¡Apúntate para el 101!https://www.danielprimo.io/newsletterSíguenos en:- Zona Premium: https://www.danielprimo.io/nivel- Curso gratis: https://www.danielprimo.io/cursogratis- Twitter: https://twitter.com/webreactiva- Telegram: https://t.me/webreactiva

In episode #1210, we share seven practical ways to use data to grow faster. It is all about finding the right tools to help you optimize and automate your operations so that you can get the maximum benefit from your marketing efforts. Tune in to hear why you should use a data scientist and keep a record of everything you do for marketing.   TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: Seven Practical Ways to Use Data to Grow Faster.  [00:30] Why data is important – think machine learning and artificial intelligence.  [00:49] Google’s built-in AI that can help you optimize your ads.  [01:10] The tools you can use to make the most of your Facebook ads.  [01:29] How using the search bar inside Google Analytics can assist you.  [02:01] The helpful reports Google Data Studio provides for executives and agencies.  [02:23] Finding automated solutions for SEO such as BrightEdge, ClickFlow, and Distilled.   [03:08] Why you want to work with a data scientist and what you can expect to pay.  [03:54] Putting everything you’ve done in marketing on an Excel spreadsheet.   [05:20] Why you want to make use of APIs.  [06:16] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information. Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Google Facebook Pattern89 Google Analytics  Google Data Studio  Supermetrics  BrightEdge  ClickFlow Distilled  RankScience  Upwork Toptal  BuiltWith  SEMrush  Ahrefs  Zapier Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:  Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #1210, we share seven practical ways to use data to grow faster. It is all about finding the right tools to help you optimize and automate your operations so that you can get the maximum benefit from your marketing efforts. Tune in to hear why you should use a data scientist and keep a record of everything you do for marketing.   TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: Seven Practical Ways to Use Data to Grow Faster.  [00:30] Why data is important – think machine learning and artificial intelligence.  [00:49] Google's built-in AI that can help you optimize your ads.  [01:10] The tools you can use to make the most of your Facebook ads.  [01:29] How using the search bar inside Google Analytics can assist you.  [02:01] The helpful reports Google Data Studio provides for executives and agencies.  [02:23] Finding automated solutions for SEO such as BrightEdge, ClickFlow, and Distilled.   [03:08] Why you want to work with a data scientist and what you can expect to pay.  [03:54] Putting everything you've done in marketing on an Excel spreadsheet.   [05:20] Why you want to make use of APIs.  [06:16] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Google Facebook Pattern89 Google Analytics  Google Data Studio  Supermetrics  BrightEdge  ClickFlow Distilled  RankScience  Upwork Toptal  BuiltWith  SEMrush  Ahrefs  Zapier Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:  Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/ill-see-your-gated-whitepaper-and-raise-you-one-fake-email-address/) We're all in with not wanting "follow up email marketing" on the latest episode of CISO/Security Vendor Relationship Podcast. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Ian Amit (@iiamit), CSO, Cimpress. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor Trend Micro. Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, helps to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Our innovative solutions for consumers, businesses, and governments provide layered security for data centers, cloud environments, networks, and endpoints. For more information, visit www.trendmicro.com. On this week's episode Why is everyone talking about this now? To gate or not to gate. Mike posted on LinkedIn about how much he appreciated vendors who don't gate their content behind a registration wall. The post blew up on LinkedIn. The overwhelming response got some vendors willing to change their tune. Hey, you're a CISO, what's your take on this? Kevin Kieda of RSA Security asks, "For an initial meeting what are the things you want the sales person to know about your business that many of them don't." Kevin says he gets frustrated that he gets the sense a prospect wants them to know what tools they're using even though he knows he often can't find out that information. What is the must know, nice to know, and boy I'm impressed you know that? Mike Johnson recommends BuiltWith.com for basic OSINT on a company site. What's Worse?! Whose mistakes are worse? Your own or the vendor's? The great CISO challenge Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) is a risk framework (often laid ontop of others) that simplifies the understanding of risk by identifying the blocks that contribute to risk and their relationship to each other and then quantifying that in terms of money. Ian, can you give me an example of how you actually do this? Since its inception back in 2010, Zero Trust Architecture has been gaining traction. Much of the interest stems from the nature of work and data today – people working from anywhere on any device, and data racing around networks and to and from the cloud means there is no single fortress where everything can exist safely. Operating on a belief that everything inside the perimeter is safe because it’s inside the perimeter is no match to today’s hacking, penetration and inside sabotage. The establishment of new perimeter protections, including microtunnels and MFA is best applied to new cloud deployments but must still somehow be factored into a legacy architecture without becoming more inconvenient and vulnerable than what it is trying to replace. More on CISO Series. Check out lots more cloud security tips sponsored by OpenVPN, provider of next-gen secure and scalable communication software. OpenVPN Access Server keeps your company’s data safe with end-to-end encryption, secure remote access, and extension for your centralized UTM. Why is this a bad pitch? What's the polite way to hande the way too generic vendor request. We offer two examples of non-specific pitches that are obviously just begging for a CISO's time. Is there a polite way to refute the request and let them know without talking down to them and letting them know that this isn't a tactic they should pursue?

In this episode, Jason and Bridget take a small break in their format to chat about developments this week in the WordPress ecosystem. How will these changes affect how plug-in businesses and freelancers market if at all? Tune in.Thank you to our sponsors!The WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com as well as Kinsta.If you’re interested in sponsoring the 40-minute mark of this show, check out the details on our sponsor page. We offer episode by episode spoken ads, rather than large contracts. A show by you for you.Jeff Chandler Leaves WPTavernBridget thinks his editorial voice will be sorely missed.Journalism tries to get both sides whereas editorial content should have opinion.Jason was more intrigued by the use of service accounts for connected services on multi user websites.Both Bridget and Jason wonder who will now provide timely, non-biased WordPress news. “Hot takes on WPwatercooler.com” is still valid news. And, honestly, most of us who comment on WordPress are also Inside Baseball. So, we’re commenting with our own source material.Thanks, Jeff for being awesome for ten years!Bridget’s Trip to MontréalBridget loved WordCamp Montréal. It was extra special because she got to see Breann McDede’s first presentation.Also, it was really neat to see how the WordPress community in Montréal embraces bilingualism. As Michel Bluma says, “#BonjourHi.”I decided to sit in Q&A part of a presentation in French. It's funny to hear words I know: "A-C-F," "Gutenberg," "Custom Post Types." Can't get much more Montreal than that. #BonjourHiPHP 7.5 — P++ Ending Backwards CompatibilityFrom PHP Storm.“P++ – The controversy and accusations in PHP Internals over the removal of short tags

Målret virksomheder med LinkedIn på baggrund af deres teknologivalg - fx virksomheder, der bruger et konkurrerende stykke software. Tip fra Casper fra Templafy. 3 step method: 1) Download liste over virksomheder der bruger software X via Discover.org eller Builtwith.com. 2) Upload listen over virksomhedsnavne til LinkedIn 3) Indsnævr til din målgruppe (fx marketing, økonomi eller salg) Nu kan du lave super specifikke annoncer. Du ved, at virksomheden bruger fx Salesforce, Sleeknote eller Facebooks Pixel og kan tale lige præcis ind i den situation.

Looking for ways to generate more new agency business? Tired of watching your competition grow and want to set your agency apart from the pack? Now is the time to be a front runner with the cutting edge technology of chatbots. You can use chatbots to generate new business and as an add-on service for your clients. It's easier than you might think to build and use a chatbot. Chatbot technology helps you engage with your ideal prospects and keep the conversation going in order to convert them into a client. In this episode, we'll cover: Why chatbots are better than other methods of prospecting. #1 mistake agencies make using chatbots. Should you add chatbot building as a service? 2 easy steps to get start using chatbots. Today I talked with Andrew Warner, Founder and CEO of Mixergy, a development resource for entrepreneurs. He's also the founder of Bot Academy. Andrew built his first company to over $30 million in sales and sold it. He started Mixergy to help business owners, by interviewing successful entrepreneurs and learning how they built their businesses. After learning about chatbots and eventually becoming an angel investor, he immediately knew chatbots were going to change the way we do business. He shares the potential that comes from using chatbots to generate new agency business. Why Chatbots Are Better Than Other Methods of Prospecting Email isn't working like it used to. Inboxes are flooded and we are learning that people love instant messaging or chats instead. People like to engage with communication apps. Chatbots are the ideal tool to educate, build trust, and nurture a relationship from prospect-stage to client-stage. For example.... Think about your Contact Page. People can come to it and ask a question... they want to know if you can help them. Then they have to wait for a response and that is it. That's the end of it. With a chatbot, there is potential for further engagement. A potential customer can ask questions while the chatbot is also garnering information. After the chatbot interaction, your agency can also followup and engage. A relationship is formed and can be nurtured over time. The change can be as simple as moving from a form, which is transactional in nature, to a chatbot that is more of a relationship-builder. A chatbot allows businesses to connect with their customers. Right now very few agencies are using chatbots, and even fewer are offering chatbot building as a service. Your agency can get in on this early-on. #1 Mistake Agencies Make Using Chatbots Don't try to have your chatbot do too much! While it can be exciting to jump out of the gate with new ideas, remember chatbots are still relatively new to the receiver and you don't want too overwhelm them. You can test my 'bot here. You'll see I only use the it to qualify the prospect and determine who I'm talking to by asking 2-3 questions. Then a live person jumps in to keep the conversation going. Should You Add Chatbot Building As A Service? In addition to using chatbots to generate new agency business, you might consider adding it as a service. Chatbot building might be a service to consider for bringing value-added to your clients. Andrew says a basic chatbot takes just minutes to make. He suggesting building one to present to your clients and let them play with it. Start by approaching your agency clients who already do email marketing well and show them how their current content would work with a 'bot. Be sure to do it in person or via video conference, so you can get real-time reactions. Since chatbots are in the early stages, creating this add-on for clients might set your agency apart from the competition. 2 Easy Steps To Get Started Using Chatbots Test out different chatbots. You wouldn't start building a website without doing some research, so approach chatbot building the same way. Check out the chatbot built specifically for this podcast, here. Create a fake chatbot and go from there. Visit botlist.co to find a list of software for chatbot building. Play with different tools to see what works for your agency and it's chatbot purposes. If you build your chatbot right, your agency will be able to know exactly where the audience is coming from. Generate leads for your agency by checking out Builtwith, to find out who's using chatbots. Then use an email service, like Mailshake to send out mass emails (that don't actually look like mass emails) as well as follow-ups, to start a chatbot conversation. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency? Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.  

Today we are talking to Chuck Mullins all about due diligence. An internet business veteran who is now a part of the Quiet Light team, Chuck purchased his first internet business while still in college and was more successful at 18 than some of the most seasoned entrepreneurs. For both the buyer and the seller, the due diligence process is one of the most difficult parts of buying and selling an online business. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools that can be used to simplify the process. In this episode, Mark and Chuck look at over 20 different due diligence tools and explain how you can use them in our due diligence processes. Episode Highlights: Chuck guides us through a group of tools that can be fundamental to any well thought out due diligence plan. Any buyer knows that this is the most important thing you can do to make sure that no stone is left unturned when preparing to make that purchase and hit the ground running. Try using a due diligence consultant service. We don't advise leaving it all up to them but they can take some of the work out of your hands. Never just research the business but remember to also research who is selling the business. Google trends is very powerful. Google Trends lets you read the trends that any given business may have experienced. Be sure to be aware if your acquisition is “trendy” or “evergreen.” SEM tools can provide insight into the business potential and the size of any risks. Website crawling tools are used to determine customer and market trends. Social media tools are an additional way to gain insight into connections for that business and also the business owner's niche interactions in their niche. Lessons from Due Diligence: For first time buyers the best advice Chuck offers is that you don't know what you don't know. Due diligence gives you the answers. Know what a tool is good at, put it in your due diligence toolbox, and use it correctly. Surround yourself with the types of people who can help you. Be careful to use your lawyer for law and your accountant for money. Always remember that you as the buyer ultimately make the business decision. Don't be afraid to ask questions! Keep good records of what you have looked at. Work off a checklist and be meticulous about it. A seller is as interested in you in the success of their business. Transcription Mark: Hey Joe, how are you? Joe: Doing good Mark, how about yourself? Mark: I'm doing well, I'd talk to somebody that we both know well and that's one of our own Chuck Mullins. Joe: Mr. Chuck Mullins, good man he is. Mark: He is, yeah. He joins us on the interview on the video part push on the interview wearing his Quit Light shirt which he had embroidered. The only person at Quiet Light that has one. Although, He didn't tell me that he made one for you. And I haven't seen you in it yet. Joe: He did I almost put it on today. It's just, it's a little big so I [inaudible 0:01:16] it. I need to put on some layer, run it through a two cycles of the dryer. Mark: It would have been so appropriate because, you know, he's wearing his shirt in this interview and you've been wearing your shirt in, and he's getting, make one for me though of course. Joe: He should. You're the founder of Quiet Light Brokerage. Mark: Absolutely. Joe: You should have like a logo on the back of your office chair that says Quiet Light Brokerage, what's wrong with you? Mark: I thought about it but. Most of my office is really a mess. If you seeing this on video and we'll talk about this one a bit. My office is usually a mess. It's all about angles, right? My angles a little bit of center today because I don't want to show you the rest of my office. So, yeah. But this actual episode is going to be great for a video. If you're listening in your car, if you're listening on the podcast, you'll still get a lot of value out of it. But I'd recommend at some point checking out the Youtube channel. We are separating our channels, so we will have a new channel, just for the podcast episodes. And this episode will, going to kick that off. So make sure you'll go there and you subscribe. And the reason that is a good one to watch on the Youtube channel is because we're reviewing due diligence tools in this episode. We actually go over 27 different due diligence tools. We bring them up on the screen and you can see, we kind of browse around and fumbling around on somebody's sites. As we talk about how you can use this in your due diligence process. Any buyer out there who is looking to acquire a business in the next few years or so, you know due diligence is probably the most important part of that process for you making sure that you're checking under every rock and every hidden area to see is there anything wrong with this business that I need to be aware of. Well Chuck and I go over 27 tools that he has used personally in his past of buying businesses. So we bring real interest in episode from that stand point. He brings a lot of experience in buying and selling businesses for.. Do you know how long he has been doing it? I can't remember off hand. Joe: In 1997 I think. He was self-employed in college, making more in one month the most people make in a year when he was in college. Mark: Right right and then, He and I have been presenting at Pubcon for 7 years. We go over this video a little bit but we've been presenting for 7 years at Pubcon together and people always come to see Chuck and then hopefully I can pick up a couple of the scraps to come off the table when presents. So it's a great presentation on a how to go about buying online businesses. Joe: And just a point out of the obvious remaining, not so obvious. Technically we represent the sellers in what we do. Well we can't help them and help them while unless we also help as many buyers as possible. So it's, many people would think that what you're about to present with Chuck is in contrast to what we do. But we're always about full disclosure, always making sure that buyers are making good investments and so that both they and the sellers are happy to closing table and it's successful transaction down the road as well. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Again, we going to do represent the sellers, but if our seller's getting sued, 3 or 4 months later that is a pretty bad job on our part. So it's important that both buyer and seller walk away from a deal, happy and when you know that deal. So that's the goal. We get a transaction wins. And part of that process is due diligence. I say, I hate like throw a due diligence. When I first started Quiet Light and I got like, you know, a monster due diligence, I would kind of [inaudible 0:04:31] and be like, Oh man, this is going to be a pain. Now when I see a well thought out due diligence, it's makes me happy because I know that, that buyer is going to be really happy and that deal is gone go through. Because where they're going to really inspect that business thoroughly. Joe: Yeah, well thought, that was important. Not just a massive list but a well thought, that was specific to the business that's being purchased. I've seen blank at due diligence less come through where somebody clearly copied and paste it. But I'm excited about this episode Chucks a really, really smart guy and successful entrepreneur and I think a lot of people would learn some good stuff here. Mark: That's good, very good. Let's get to it. Mark: Hey Chuck, how are you? Chuck: Doing great. How are you Mark? Mark: I'm good. Thanks for joining me on the call. I see you have your nice Quiet Light shirt on. You're the only one at Quiet Light that has that shirt. Chuck: That's because I took the initiative to have it made. Mark: Right. We'll get them for everybody else eventually. Chuck: Actually, I think I bought Joe one. But he didn't want it. Mark: Oh really, I got to start getting on him so he wears it from the Podcast. Chuck: Yeah Mark: Yeah, anyway for this Podcast, if you guys are listening to this in your car, this would be one of the once that I would recommend over going to Youtube and we've set up a new channel on Youtube just for the interviews. We're going to put all our interviews on that channel. I'd recommend looking at that because we're going to review a bunch of due diligence tools. A little bit of background between Chuck and myself. Chuck and I have been presenting at Pubcon. What? 7 years I think? Chuck: Yeah, I think so. Mark: Yeah, a very long time. Chuck invited me to speak within that Pubcon a while ago. We've been doing it ever since we've had all the people join us occasionally, to talk about buying and selling websites. But he and I have been talking about that night. Typically we talk on the sell side and Chuck was talking on the buy side. And the result was that more people are interested in what Chuck had to say than I was ever had to say. So I figured, it would be good to have you on here. Both, so I think we can get to know you a bit better. I'd also review some of the due diligence that you've use in the past in buying online businesses. So let's just do a quick introduction for you as far as your background. What's your background in buying and selling online businesses? Chuck: So, I started my first website back in 1996. Through the few years, made a bunch of money in college just a kind of doing really well. And made more money than you know, than I was living on. So I start looking at doing various investments. So, start looking at real estate, franchises, I was looking at car washes, and a storage facilities, and a Laundromats. And nothing ever, just kind of, really worked for me or really peaked my interest enough. You know like, I dabbled in real estate. But everything just kept kind drawing me back to the internet business. So then, you know, I made a few websites that were successful. But I started thinking about you know, what if I could acquire somebody's company and then just build upon that and stand on somebody else's shoulders, instead of trying to prove out a model myself. You know, use a model that has been proven by somebody else. And then just take all the knowledge I had, and expertise, and grow that. So I start doing really well, and at a certain point I just fell alive, you know presenting at a conference, and kind of just, giving back, and then that's when I reached out to you and I think my initial presentation I gave was with Jason, Quiet Light, we did it at affiliate summit. I don't even know, 8 or 9 years ago.   Mark: Yeah, I remember that. I was in the audience for that presentation and then, that was January. I remember specifically because it was really cold at that conference in Las Vegas. The fountains were frozen when we got out of the hotel. I was kind of surprised about that. So it's cool! So yeah, you've been doing this presentation for a long time and I know whenever we do the presentation, when we get to the slide on due diligence, whereas all the phones in the rooms go up to take pictures, because people are really interested to know what's our tools they can use to do due diligence. So we're going to review some of these tools here, as well as talk about some of the principles, buyers might want to apply when you're doing your due diligence. As always, we'll just throw out the blanket; cover your tails sort of a disclaimer here. Due diligence is ultimately a buyer's responsibility. Make sure that you're doing it, make sure that you are bringing in professionals. What we're going to do is were going to give some advices to things that we've seen work, but by all means, this is not complete when you're talking about due diligence. Wherein you need to apply a complete process to the business that you are looking at. So I'm going to share my screen here and open this up, and I'm just going to share the full screen, and hopefully on my [inaudible 0:08:56] of so that people don't get those. But can you see that chart does that come up for you? Chuck: Yeah. Mark: Alright. Good, good. So here we go, where going to just get started right away with this list of tools and I'll be browsing to the website as you talk about the individual ones. The first one that we're going to talk about is Centurica and they're full service due diligence firm. They are the only one of that sort that we have on this list. So why don't you talk a little bit about Centurica, what they do and why they made this list. Chuck: Sure, So Chris Yates is the owner of Centurica, they've been around for quite a while and Chris runs a buying and selling website conference called and Rhodium. Rhodium Weekend I think is kind of, the official name. I ran into Chris way back when I started to look at buying and selling businesses. he was the first person.. I'm always looking for knowledge where I look into learn more. So doing some searches and came across his conference and went to it. Kind of on a whim, because there was no information about the conference because that was the first one that they've had. So it was like, trying to figure out and I thought well, for the money, maybe I'll pick up something and if not, it's not a total lost because you know, I'm just come and go to Vegas to hang out. You know Chris is really a smart guy and I ended up I think I was probably the first one we, to get into his master mind group. So I'm going to master mind group with Chris and a bunch of other entrepreneurs and he does this great due diligence product were he just kind of takes it over from you. Will do like a full blown due diligence review on a business that you're going to acquire and I would never say that you should handle fully the [inaudible 0:10:33] somebody else do the due diligence. But you should allow, if you're going to hire somebody, do it in parallel with them. So that way you're just getting, you know, a second, third set of eyes on a due diligence and on the business that you're looking to acquire. So they offer various levels and, so it looks like they've got something from 59 dollars right there and all the way up to, I think a 5,000 dollar package. That's kind of like a suit to nuts version. Mark: Yeah and just look at the website; they have a whole team of people here that are associated with them. A lot of these people, you and I know, we know them through Rhodium Weekend and through that master mind group as well. These are some really smart guys, good guys, to be able to just get on the phone with and get their feedback. In fact, I'm seeing n a few guys here, Mike Nunez, he has been on a Podcast with us before and a super smart guy. Well, these guys are [inaudible 0:11:24] really good contact as well. These are people that you can arrange calls with and bounce my ideas of. The amount of money, 5,000 dollars, some people might [inaudible 0:11:35] sort of price tag, but what do you think? Do you think that's worth spending that much money on due diligence support? Chuck: Yeah I mean, with Quiet Light, we're generally not dealing with the lower end deals, right? We're generally dealing with mid to high six figures, mid to low seven figure deals, so you know, five grand and that's their highest package, right? They got stuff that's cheaper, but how could you go wrong, you know, spending.. If you're on a million dollar deal, what's five grand, is what? Half a percent? I think it's probably money well spent. Mark: Yeah, absolutely I agree. The only assets that you put an end, this is, that whenever you are hiring somebody on the outside to potentially look for problems, understand that, what they're going to do is they're going to find problems because that's what you're hiring them to do, and they should do that. So this is not a criticism or some trick or by any means or attorney that's looking up for liability issues. But as the buyer, understand that you need to take that information, process it, through a business decision that you're making. Any sort of due diligence tool? I knew the ones that we offer here, that's the way that you should be going about using that information, that fits into the larger scheme. Alright, let's move on, Centurica is a good service. If anyone wants an introduction pres, it's either Chuck or I can provide an introduction pres as well. The next two are related obviously, Google.com and Google Trends, everybody knows what Google is, I'm sure most know what Google Trends are. How would you use each of these sites in a due diligence process? Chuck: Sure! So with Google, right? I mean, it's just a matter of Googling things either about the business, about the person, if you're buying the business, Google the terms around the business, and look for red flags, right? Look for if they've got one star review, average one star review, maybe that tells you something about the business. You know, look for complaints, things that are negative about the business, right? It's kind of one of those, you'll catch all due diligence place where you just, kind of sorting through all of the information that you can find on a given business and/or a person. Never just research the business, always research the person who is selling the business as well because, you could find out a lot of stuff and make sure that you're avoiding, potentially avoid some of the pitfalls, if somebody has done some sketchy stuff in the past, and find that out. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. You can learn a lot about their background as well, and all you have to do is search for all of the places that I have written for, come up, but years ago, I was involved in a lawsuit in those couple of pages. And so, anyone that was doing research on me, I would often get those sort of questions, “What happened then?” everything was fine. I didn't mind the questions, but people that were being smart and doing due diligence would ask about that. Chuck: And don't just look at the first page of Google. Look at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, right? Because anybody can hire a reputation management company that will push some of those negative reviews, you know, to the 2nd or 3rd page. But they'll be there generally, still, just maybe a little lower. Mark: Right, Now if anyone wonders and are looking at the screen, I did not play hockey. Even though I'm from Minnesota I'm not a hockey player. There's a couple of them, that's out there that have gotten their name out there. Google trends, what search term I put in there? Chuck: Yeah so type in Paleo Recipe, or Paleo Diet I mean, because Paleo is a little different. So, if you look at the screen. Mark: You changed the date range? Chuck: Yes I changed the date range. That's, in January, you see that giant spike. Because that's when everybody is getting into a diet mode. Check that out even further. Mark: So we're looking right now. Let's set 2004 to present. So we'll do the entire history in Google Trends. There we go. Chuck: Sure, so you know, if you're looking to buying a business, and you're seeing.. Well use Google Trends to figure out what the trends are. Here you'll see is like a giant up peak that just kind of went up, and then all of a sudden it just kind of, trail off, and you're going to find things like this. Then you'll also notice that there is like ups and downs, like inter year, so that would be like the seasonally of the business, right? So just because you see, like this one giant peak, which correlates with January, and then you know, throughout the rest of the year it drops until December where December is at it's low, around Christmas time then it spikes immediately back up. So you're going to look for not only seasonality but you can look for long term trends. And when you're looking at businesses, think about whether the business is a trendy business first, it's an evergreen business. So, diet in general is a trendy business. If you look almost any diet, you'll see that there's a, it goes up, up , up, up and all of a sudden it tails off, right? There's something made it go up, usually it got unpopular, and then it'll trend off. I personally, one of the businesses that I bought was a Paleo website, and I managed to buy it exactly at the peak market, and then.. Mark: Right about there right? Right around January of 2013, early 2013. Chuck: Yup, definitely it's like, it was going up, up, and up, I'm like, great! Then it went down, down, down, and it was less great. So, luckily, we were able to so a little bit of magic and kind of keep the revenue going by trying to grow the business but it's another story. Mark: Something else that you can do with this, so as many people know, I own CatholicSingles, and the turn chart out for CatholicSingles doesn't look that great, when you look at it. Something I've learned from this chart from a few other places is, if you think that you're buying a website that gets lots of natural search traffic, be careful to make sure that it's not branded search traffic. So what's happening here is, the previous owner was losing out to a competitor who was beating him in a brand search, and so, the site still gets lots of natural search traffic to a keyword that still has a lot of relevance. But he lost a lot of brand relevance as well. So you can, if it's a large enough property you can often pick up on brands trends and what are not, you're going to have to compete on that [inaudible 0:17:34] as well. You can type in competing services and see what their trend is overtime as well. And you can actually compare the two together. So you can see how competition is playing along with. Maybe what you're looking at acquiring. Chuck: And then if you scroll down, you can do it by region as well. So what are the countries that has something popular. So maybe it was a US based company, and you see “Hey look! It's doing well in Canada and South America” or I guess none of that case was in South America, but Australia, and I think it was Mexico maybe. So maybe you expand into some of those other countries. Mark: Right, right. Exactly. Yeah Google Trends has some good date out there, I recommend again putting in your, whatever, competitors you know of, and comparing the traffic and the trends for the competitors and get the sense for, how those are working together. Chuck: And one additional point would be, Google trends is the search volume of a specific keyword, so it's not some magic formula, it's how many people are searching for something. So sometimes, people search, the way they search for things changes overtime, so you just want to, kind of remember that. That just because, you know. People might have been searching for, I don't know, Blue Widgets but now they're calling it, instead of Blue Widgets, they're calling it Blue Fuzzies, right? So it doesn't always mean that the actual market is declining at it. Sometimes it can just be a change in the way people are searching. Mark: Yeah, I think an example, that would be internet marketing has pushed toward in digital marketing. And so you see, the phrase you use to refer to something, is slightly different overtime. So, that's a good point. Now let's move off this chart because it's sort of depressing. State business websites, this is one that I haven't really seeing people a whole lot of, but it's a really good idea to use state business websites. Chuck: Yeah, I mean it's just the basic of going to whatever state the company is in, doing a search for the business, finding out who the owners are, and if there's any kind of red flags that maybe appear on that, just some basic due diligence there. Mark: Yeah, that one's not coming up here, but when you do the search, what will happen is, you'll see the records with the state, whether or not if filed in good standing, any other possible red flags that would come up. It's really just checking their box, making sure that everything is on the up and up with that business search. Maybe we can get back to this, if that comes up again. BuiltWith is a really cool tool and it shows all the technologies that a website was built with, right? Chuck: Yeap! Absolutey! So if you want to look at, like the technologies that go.. Is your internet out? Mark: No, I just typed it in wrong. Chuck: I guess your internet wouldn't be out, considering we're.. Mark: Right, right. So we could take a look to see what Quiet Light Brokerage is built on. And you can see that we have Googled conversion tracking, you can you see the whole technology stack and all the services that are used. When this might be useful as if you're looking at the P&L and you don't see a subscriptions but you would see here Drip. And you know that Drip is a subscription based service maybe that's not their P&L. That would be something to catch and maybe ask them about to find out what's going on there. Maybe they just start using [inaudible 0:20:47]the website. Chuck: Absolutely! And you know, one of the things you want to do as part of getting ready to acquire a site is make sure that you have the people and place to take over any kind of service that you need in advance. Right, so, if you have no idea how to use Drip and you're taking it in purchase in your company, maybe you need to has somebody in place who does know how to use it or request a standard operating procedure so that you can learn how to use it. So I would definitely have a list of like all of the kind of aspects of the business that you're not proficient at. And make sure that you have people in place that can help you with that [inaudible 0:21:26] running when you do take over the business. Mark: You know something that, speaking of Drips, I talked to Rob who sold Drip to Leadpages a few years ago, and he talked to me about how Leadpages was completely ready and able to switch over to a new website surely after they closed. They were making plans and building out technology as they were going through due diligence so that they can hit the ground, running right away. Something that might you want to do as you're going through a website's technology stack is take a look at what services are you using. If you are going to the Quiet Light website you'll notice that we have Hotjar, for example. Now I haven't tracked anything with Hotjar on the website in a while. We use it for surveys once in a while, but this would be a service for, maybe those report that you want to ask for during due diligence. Maybe some heat mapping that would just be useful information for you to be able to see and as you're making plans. Or OptinMonster, asked, have you run these campaigns before? What was the conversion rate like on these campaigns? And you can start getting really prepared as you're doing your due diligence to make that transition. Of course some sellers may not be eager to share some of that information with you, so go about that with some level of sensitivity understanding that they might be ready to open up all the books to you, but knowing what's there can help you request different reports. And Chuck you said something before in one of your presentations, probably multiple presentations and that was ask questions. Ask lots and lots of questions. Chuck: Yup, absolutely. I always say ask, ask, ask, and even ask questions you know the answers to. I feel like that's like some kind of weird tactic that people do. But they ask questions regardless of whether you know the answer because you almost want to get a seller to lie to you, because then you know how trust worthy they are right? If somebody's going to lie to you about something, it's a red flag. So, I've seen a lot of people that will ask the same questions in multiple ways. You don't want to be annoying right? Like, don't ask stupid questions but definitely ask. I shouldn't say, you don't want to ask stupid question because almost no question's stupid right? But we all understand there are all stupid questions that you shouldn't ask, that's just, are irrelevant. But don't feel like, if it's relevant to you then it's not a stupid question. So, ask everything. Because the time to ask is before you buy it. Right? You don't want to have a bunch of questions after you've inked the check. So, ask early and then ask often. Mark: Then the other thing too is you can get more callers on a particular answer. I know when I talk to some sellers and ask them why are you selling? They'll give me an answer one day and had talked to them another day and they give me s slightly different answer. And it's not that they're lying. The reasons are complex. There's more than one reason going on there and you gain caller, you gain more information about what's really going on behind the sale. By asking the same question, and looking at, in different formats, I know when you started to do video interviews or recording interviews of some of our clients and part of the reason for that is because people talk about questions differently then they might write them out. So this could ask a lot of those questions. Chuck: Yeah, absolutely! Archive.org. Mark: This is a great one. So if you're doing some due dilligence there's a whole industry people who just buy expired domains, stir a new content on it and then run with the site. Some of the amazing firm like [inaudible 0:24:38]some of them are buying like big sites, or what used to be a big site and for whatever reason, site's no longer so, this will give you an idea like in 2008. What was the site look like? Was it a brokerage site or not back then, you know. It's not always a bad thing but if it was something spamy back then, It might still have some problems moving forward. So it's also good just to see if you had some ideas of you wanted to try this or try that. And getting an idea for some of the things they've tried in their past or looking at previous screenshots of what the site was like one, two, three, four years ago? Mark: Yeah, I think one of the big challenges that you always have as a buyer and.. Sellers as well have this issue, right. Sellers know their business intimately because they've lived with it for so many years. As a buyer, you're coming in and trying to compress knowledge that they've gain over the course of sometimes 20 years now. And to a decision that you have to make within or week or two. Going back in the scene, what the history of the site was, just kind of, again it adds color, it adds more information into what does this person done in the past for the business. Like you said maybe we can see some things that they tried and you can ask them about that, if you're looking at the Quiet Light site, yeah, you might see that we sold some domains in the past. And if there's someone looking to buy us they could ask a question on that, you know, why don't you sell domains anymore? And we could go into that whole discussion. Chuck: Something else to look for is to look for gaps in the years so you know, you can put something on your website, right? And your like, your a [inaudible 0:26:14]telling a way back machine not to cross your site anymore. So if there's like a three year gap, why is that gap? Most legitimate sites aren't blocking the way back machine. From calling their site, so you know, that might raise a red flag and might be something you want to dive in on a little deeper. Mark: Awesome, alright let's move on at Trademarkia.com. Chuck: Yeah, you know it's a, if you're, if they told you to have a trade mark, search for it, figure it out. If they have told you they don't have a trade mark, search for it. See if somebody else has a trade mark right? Make sure that they're not infringing on somebody else's.. What's the word I'm looking for.. Somebody else's IP. You don't want to buy a business if they're infringing on other people's stuff. Mark: Yeah, and this can also be a very useful in search results if you're advertising on Google and you have competitors that are stepping all over that brand search. If you get that trade mark and you have the ability to get a trade mark you can keep all of those guys off, and brand is usually a very cheap way. But if you have competitors branding against it, that's [inaudible 0:27:16] your IP, so, searching for that trade mark is a useful thing to do. Alright, moving to the next set of tools and these tools here seem to be more of, search competitive intelligence and taking look at a site's search profile and I should just say probably maybe SEM. All [inaudible 0:27:33] right? Because this still include adwords as well? Chuck: Yeap, yeap! So organic and paid, my likes spy for a lot. It's a.. You can look at people's history of what kind of ad campaigns they did. As so, if somebody says “Oh we've only ever run one ads set and haven't done much testing” and then you look back at, and shows you. Well actually they ran a hundred different variations of this ad. Cross, you know 5 years and blah blah. So you will able to see a.. Verify some of the information they said. You can also check and it will show you, like literally shows you, what paid ads they ran. And like detects in them. So if you think, “Oh I wonder if they try this”, so you're going to look back and see what sorts of ads they've run. It's kind of interesting, you can also use this right here, like you see their competitor. So that'll show you overlap, so if you know some of, some competitors, you'll be able to see like what keywords they have overlapping using this venn diagrams. It's some really cool stuff and then you can look for opportunity, for words that they're going after, that your knots. They also have they a tool in here somewhere that will allow you to look at specific keywords over time and then it puts it over a timeline and has the Google updates. So you can see like, ok they had this key word was, you know, rank number 1111, and then drops off to like number 7, and [inaudible 0:28:57] Google get an update right when this happen so you can potentially know why they dropped off, it's because, well, Google did this update. So seeing what people are using like a private blog now, where to get a bunch of links and it's like doing really, really well then everything drops off a cliff. Because of Google did an update and it affect it, or, the reverse is true where they went from having nothing to all off a sudden number 1 rankings, just like overnight. And you can see, okay, well nobody just all send this from zero to number 1 ranking for 20 different keyword terms so then you know, Well, they must have done something to have that spike and then you can dive into what they're using like, blog that works for paid links or whatever. Mark: Yeah, any sort of quick changes in these results are going to be something to watch out for. So that's over all a good tool. And a lot of these tools out here, Moz, Open Site Explorer, Semrush, Magestic, AAtraps, I personaly like AAtraps. These are all really good tools, using in combination. It's going to give you a sense for how the data all adds up. Understand that when you're looking at data, in any of these tools, they have to use third parties to estimate what this is, for example, they're estimating for Quiet Light Brokerage, where estimated adwords budget is 3,000 bucks. Actually not too far off from that, but it's not accurate. Just understand that these are useful for trends, these are useful for getting another point of data, nothing's going to replace first hand tracking, it should be Google and Linux, or whatever tool people are using to analyze something. But you can use all these external tools in combination as well to try complete picture of what a website's doing and how it's ranking. Chuck: It's a bit [inaudible 0:30:45] That was I think only Google adwords, so if not taking your account, pay traffic, whether it's Facebook or other things. Right? Mark: Yep, yep! Absolutely that's right! Let's move on to a.. You like Spy for the best from all of these? Chuck: They are all kind of different. So there's like different reasons to use different ones, right? Some are for keyword research, some have like keyword difficulty tools, so part of due diligence isn't just looking at what the site has done, but where you can go with it. So I like to use a couple of them to do keyword research. See where their gaps are, you know, opportunity for me to grow the business. They're all kind of hit, different things to different things well. So I don't have one favorite. I do like SpyFu, I like Moz in the past, [inaudible 0:31:31], Majestic. And then on that list, we kind of didn't point it which I'm guessing maybe you thought I put in a wrong spot, but the alexa.com won. I haven't actually used this yet, but it's apparently a new tool that they rolled out. It's a competitor to all these other ones, Moz and Majestic. So they're doing a paid tool just like all these other guys. So, I haven't really dove into it yet, but it'll be interesting to maybe see how their data looks. Mark: Yeah, I actually just saw this the other day. And was intrigued by it. I haven't dug into this at all. But you would imagine that Alexa's by Amazon. You would imagine that they have some pretty good access to tools to be able estimate this information, with some level of accuracy. Chuck: And you know they've been around, since when, like early 2000 or earlier. So they've been crawling off these sites. So who knows what kind of information they've stored. I see [inaudible 0:32:34] has really good info going pretty far back. Mark: yeah, I know you're right on that. I think actually Alexa may have been the first competitive intelligence tool. That try to rank websites. Maybe there was somebody else before that. But they were the first one's who really gain attraction. Or that for a long time, everybody I knew had their Alexa bar. Up in their browser and you can see what, aside Alexa ranking was along with its paid rank. Right every marketer back in early 2010 and those two things, up in their tool bars. Chuck: It's fine, so I went to the site yet the other day, just checking it out and looking for their little site ranking. I could find it anywhere, so I'm not sure if they still have it or not. Mark: Yeah, I don't know. I try to look that up recently as well and I wasn't able to find it. I was behind actually this pay wall which is how I came across [inaudible 0:33:24] they are now offering this. Chuck: Yeah, yeah. It didn't, for a long time, like, right Google paid rank and the Alexa ranking have been dead like nobody uses those as a real stat anymore . But I just wanted to check it out. Mark: Yeah, yeah I know it's always interesting stuff. Alright let's move on to page 2 here. We're going to get into 3 tools here. [inaudible 0:33:46], deepcrawl.com and Copyscape. What do these tools do? Chuck: Yeah, The first two are pretty similar to each other. And what they do is you can plug in a domain name that it will crawl the entire site and it will look for all kinds of things. Like errors or not errors. Right, so it can show you just by crawling to the site. It will crawl every single link on the site from every single page. So it shows you like if there's dead links so if there are stuff that's going for like 404 pages, no errors, 500 errors, it will show you the redirects. So what I've used it for in the past is the one finding those dead pages or the 404 errors and then also finding the redirects and sometimes you'll see like stuff gets layered, where it will be redirected to this page, which layer's was then redirected to this page, which layer's then redirected to this page. And ultimately, what should you be doing is just going back and linking from the first page to the last page. And not using all of these bounces because with each bounce you have the a, potentially you're losing some of that authority has being passed through. Mark: Yeah, and there are the futuristic will do an on-site SEO analysis for even, one that I've used in the past that all definitely throw a, [inaudible 0:35:01] to be Orange Fox, Jacob Hagberg, has done some reports from Quiet Light Brokerage. and a lot of these tools do is, what these services work, will do, they just to analyze in a condensed manner. Because they look for opportunities and they also look for potential issue. Like you're saying, if there's tons of redirects in there, that's a problem, you are losing out an authority on those pages. 10 pages , 404, broken images. Images without all tags, accessibility issues. These are all things that you want to be looking for. Not necessarily as like major red flags but you know, a buyer beware, but also as opportunities that if you start to fix and clean these things up, there's going to be a natural lift in rankings on its long tale keywords that maybe you're on page 10 to 20 right now for, maybe that will bump you up to the first 10 results . So wait for you to just grow some opportunity. When you're looking at these 3 tools Chuck.. Chuck: The first two are very similar, right? Screaming Frog, is one that you have on your own computer, and then it use your internet connection to then crawl the site. DeepCrawl, they are running it from their servers, the Screaming Frog is relatively cheap. I forget the amount but it's hundred to 200 bucks a year. The DeepCrawl one is fairly pricey so, I would always recommend this Screaming Frog but the other one is a good service as well. Just cost a bit more. It's a 150 pounds a year. Mark: Right. They do have a free version? I've used the free version to be honest it's worth just upgrading to a paid version. Free version will give you just a flavor of what they can do. But if you really want to dig deep and really figure things out. Yeah, again, here's a 500 URL limit, most websites are going to blow through that 500 URLs because you have all their images, you have everything else connected with an individual page, so you'll go through that 500 pretty quickly. Copyscape is a bit different from these two though. Chuck: Yeah, it's different. I threw it, kind of witness just because it's one of those things, where again, you're looking for problems, so you type in your domain and It'll give you list of you know, places that content made and stolen from. So kind of, similar, but different. Mark: Right. This can be useful to see if you have people that are maybe trying' just scrape your pages entirely or if the page you're looking at for some reason is built on a shakey ground. This was something that was used a lot more probably, I don't know, 5, just 7 years ago. I know Copyscape has a really big issue on a really big useful tool for duplicate content issues. A lot of that is going away now. But I would imagine you would find copies of content that somebody's publishing their blog contents, say, on Medium or LinkedIn. I imagine this would probably pick up on that. Chuck: Yeah. I believe so. And you know when we talk about the duplicate content issue, where talking about like, right for organic search but there's also the duplicate content issue where, “Hey everything on this website was stolen from somewhere else and you're going to get sued because you stole our base content.”, Right so, I would be checking to make sure that people aren't stealing other people's content. You know, so I think that's a good part of due diligence. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Alright Public WWW. This is a tool I have not heard of. Chuck: Yeah, that's a great tool. It kind of isn't a vain, of like, a Google right? But what's cool about it is instead of like.. If I want to search for something on Google. Google looks at what is this plate on the page meaning. If I search for Chuck it's looking for.. If somebody would look at a web page and see the word Chuck on it, then it might come up, right? But with this website, it's actually looking at the source code. So if somebody had a comment that was Chuck, it would potentially come up there. So, anywhere from the word Chuck, right? It's more for if you want to look a analytics code, or if you want to find somebody's affiliate ID. So if somebody's says, “Hey, I'm just running AdSense on this site, and I don't have it anywhere else.”, So we could took.. Put in the AdSense number, and it will show you all the sites that are using that same AdSense ID on their website, right? So you can look for, maybe they're doing some competing stuff, maybe they just, you know, they're driving more income through the AdSense, but having a multiple sites vs the one. And it's not complete, right? There's, it's only as much as they crawl so they're only going to have as much data of the websites they crawl. But you can definitely find some stuff. You can also use a little tip here, would be.. Let's say you have an affiliate product your promoting, right? And you're making some money off of that, and say, you found a new product you want to promote and it makes 10 times the amount of money for each one you sell and you know that like, “Oh! This product, if I switch it to this one, I'm going to make 10X.” Or you could look for everybody who is promoting this old product, and then you're going to try to acquire those sites, and switch them to the new affiliate product and 10X the revenue. A lot of different things you can do with that. Mark: I've heard some of people ask about that, specifically with affiliate sites. You know, “How do I know that this is all coming from the site that I'm buying.”, and so that would be one tool that you could use. The other thing I could see this being useful for is if you have a tool for it. This would be a pretty rare case, but if you're buying a business as a tool, that's using on outside websites. WordPress plugins site, WordPress themes site, or any other tool like that, you could start to get some ideas as for the installation volume. Using the tool like this. Alright, SpyOnWeb.com. Chuck: So similar right it's a looking for people's AdSense IDs and things like that. It's not as complete, with the other one you could search for a lot more different types of things. But still a useful tool. Mark: Right, it gives you some machine information as for our tools also sharing this IP address, DNS server. So again, not [inaudible 0:40:53] information here, but just acquiring [inaudible 0:40:56] this. We have our [inaudible 0:40:58]. So If you want to find out what the [inaudible 0:41:02] rank is, just go to SpyOnWeb and you could also see the page rank which is saying Quiet Light Brokerage just a like a question mark for page ranks. So that would be an information. That would have scared me about a 6 or 7 years ago. Alright, DomainIQ. Chuck: Yup, so DomainIQ and the other two that were listed. This are for finding out information about a domain name. So when was it registered, how many times has the DNS changed, has the ownership changed recently, what other domains are on the same server, or same IP block or same IP address, so if you know, if you're buying something from somebody, and they say it's the only site they have and then you look start looking up and down the IP range or looking on the server or the same IP and you see there's other domain names that are the same thing and are not disclosing it you, you know, that's potentially going to be an issue. You can look up who is the owner, so if it's like similar registration name or similar email address used to register the domain, it will show you all of the domains they own. That are using that registration information. These are all for the most part paid services. So if you want to get, like the good data, you got to pay for it. But they do give you a basic level of information for free. Mark: Right. I don't think anybody has to use all these tools. You pick 1 or 2 out of each of these categories that you want to use. The only one that I would recommend maybe use in multiples one would be in this search intelligence the SpyFu, Moz, and SEMrush. I think it might be worthwhile having upwards of three maybe four depending on how lights would turns out those services. Because like you said they all do slightly different things. Chuck: It's a matter of like what they've indexed right? So they each have their own crawlers, and none of them are going to crawl exactly the same subset of the internet. So, it's just, you're going to find different things while using different ones. Mark: Right, and they all have different levels of accuracy you could see here DomainIQ is [inaudible 0:43:04] to be higher than the last one. And also, few other bits of information that I would say are incorrect but again you use these points of data… Chuck: That was 5,000 dollars? The appraisal value? Mark: That was [inaudible 0:43:17] it's less than 500 dollars. And we have more than 24 backlinks, but again, all these tools are to be used in combination with each other to put together a large picture. Obviously a tool like Google Analytics or [inaudible 0:43:31] you'll going to want to use that first. And then, these tools are been used to fill in the gaps. Chuck: And also like know what a tool is good at, so like last one, you're not going to use that tool for the appraised value right? Like, that's nonsense. But if you scroll up, scroll up a little bit. If you click on, click on the ownership record in the blue, the blue button is there. Let's see if we'll.. Mark: We got gears turning here.. There we go Chuck: Okay so just search who the owner is, when is the last time you updated, when it expires, the age of it, right. So you've owned it for just about almost 11 years, you're using Cloudflare, here's the “who is” info…. Mark: It's kind of a bad corporation name, I got to update that. Chuck: Well there you go. And go back one more time on it, I'll click on one more thing… Mark: All these tools take too long to load up. Let's move on, because this one's getting a little bit longer. Let's get it on to a Bannedcheck.com. Chuck: Yeah, so this one is a, and it's not 100% right. But you can type in AdSense account and I'll tell you if the AdSense account has been banned. Again, not 100%, but if it's says it's banned, that's probably a good indication. I'm sorry not the AdSense account number but the actual domain name. Right so, if somebody says, “Oh! I switched monetization methods, because I didn't like AdSense and I was making a bunch more money with this.” Well, maybe that's not the case, maybe it's that they got banned. So, this is a good one. They can tell you whether they've been, not a 100% right. But if it's says that they've been band, then they've probably have been, right? Mark: Good news with this, I'm making money with Quiet Light Brokerage because it came back and it says that it's not banned for Google AdSense. Chuck: I wonder how that helps with our value of the 500 dollars. Mark: Hopefully, this is a little bit, so all you buyers that are looking to buy a business, we're going to require that you click on an Adsense ad. Because I think that's completely [inaudible 0:45:16] with our terms of service. Mark: socialmention.com. Chuck: Yeah, so just you know, you type in various things here and it will just tell you where it's being mention as far as social goes. So just a good tool for doing some basic due diligence. Mark: Yeah, let's repeat, useful to do, using combination with a Google trends to be able to see. Google Trends is measuring the data on Google itself. Looking at how the different social media networks are also processing the data. It's going to have a different look than just what Google has. On that note, I would say BuzzSumo, which is not on your list. It's another tool that I would recommend adding and it's a page where they do the free option but you can take a look to see what content has done really well on a particular domain name. As well as what content in that specific niche also does well. So you can really got a sense for how popular [inaudible 0:46:15] and what's getting shared and what's not. Well for then Google but also within the social media. It seems fantastic. Chuck: This one definitely should've been on my list then I'm not sure why it wasn't but I actually like this one a lot better. Mark: Will add this to the list. For people who want to download it. Last one it would be just going direct to the source of Facebook LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., etc. Almost every websites these days has presence on all the social media networks, visit their pages I assume that's kind of a lesson there. Chuck: Yeah and again, with like a LinkedIn, right? Looking at the person's profile looking how many connections they have. Are they in a niche where they should have 500 LinkedIn connections and they've only got 3, Maybe that tells you something, right? Why are they connected with all of these hackers or whatever, right? It's just a matter of again, researching the people and not just the business. So I think it's a good tool for researching people. Mark: Awesome, right. So that's a lot of tools that we just went over. Let's talk just a some couple of lessons, and we're running pretty long on this Podcast. So, we'll talk just a couple lessons about due diligence. I'm going to turn off the screen sharing here and talk about couple lessons about due diligence. What would you say for somebody who's going about due diligence the first time? What couple of lessons would you, or principles, should they really use in their due diligence efforts. Chuck: So I think one of the biggest things, is first in for most you don't know what you don't know. right, so having people to help advice you on what to search for and what to look for can be critical. So don't just think you know everything! Because none of us know everything especially when it comes to different tricks and tactics people can employ to inflate the numbers in what they're doing. What else, do you have any idea you would suggest? Mark: I would, and so on that note, obviously bringing people like an attorney, bringing an accountant, as I said before that be careful when you do so because they are being brought in with their specific purpose in mind, that are being brought in to look for liabilities, for being brought in to look for problems, and you are the business owner trying to make a business decision. Your accountant that's trying to make an account decision. Your lawyers try to make in legal decision. And so, you have to take their advice and put it into a broader framework business . It's a good business choice for you. You use their bits of data as [inaudible 0:48:41]data. And create a whole picture with that. The other thing that you said, where you cover this one's ask, ask, ask. Don't be afraid to ask for questions and then the third thing that I would recommend is keep good records of what you have looked at. And I'm working through the due diligence for the client, if a buyer comes back and ask for the same documents that they may have already received earlier on. Extremely annoying for a seller who doesn't understand why they even needed it in the first place. And a lot of sellers get skeptical buyers. They think this person isn't really serious about it. they're just looking fishing for information and if you end up passing the same documents 3 or 4 times, even twice. It start to grow those seeds of doubt and to bigger than just seeds and it cause a lot of problems really later on. So be organized in your due diligence just as you want your seller to be organized. Even your documentation. So that you'd know what you have and work off a check list, where be the last thing that I would ask. But don't be afraid to add to that check list as you go through. Chuck: Sure and something else I would add, kind of similar, not a little different, is with the seller. They're interested in knowing that you're going to do well with their business and whether they realize it or not, the questions you ask them are important to them. Almost always. So if you're not asking good questions, they're going to think that you're not serious or that you're not going to do well with the business and we often see that buyers, or sellers won't always sell to the person who offers the most money often times they're selling to the person they think who's going to do best with their business or somebody that they like. I see it time and time again. Recently I had a nice 7 figure deal, I was working with and every time I get off a call, you know, I do a wrap up call with the seller, “Okay, what do you think? and he went like, “Well that person didn't ask any good questions like, I don't want to sell my business to them.”, So make sure that you're doing some due diligence upfront, you're looking into these things and you have good questions that you're asking that are relevant to the business. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Do not research ahead of time, not wasting your seller's time on the conference call is important. A lot of good sellers, when they go to sell a business, within that first week, they're going to do half of dozen to a dozen conference calls and it's exhausting to do. So if they get into a call and somebody asks, ask them question that was covered right up front. There's a good place to ask questions that have never been answered, and there's obviously you haven't done your homework, sort of questions. So do have basic homework ahead of time so that people know about, that you've put in that upfront research. One thing I'll add at that fellows, is if there's something that you're not familiar with, ask them about it and don't be afraid about that. And at the end of the day, as a buyer you want to protect your money, but make sure you're not making a bad investment so, don't be afraid to ask those questions. If you ever have questions about, “Can I discuss this or what do you think?” Use the broker. We're here to advice with the buyer and the seller through that process, we want to see a good deal done for our client. Chuck: Absolutely! Mark: Alright, this has been really long, but I think, good information so, Chuck thanks so much for coming on and maybe down the road, we'll do another one of these. Chuck: Sounds good. I appreciate it! Mark: Cool, thanks! Chuck: Alright, thanks everybody! Links and Resources: Centurica offers a full blown due diligence services. Google Google Trends Builtwith Archive Trademarkia.com SEM tools: Spyfu moz majestic alexa semrush Website crawling tools: screamingfrog deepcrawl orangefox copyscape Publicwww is a source code search engine Spyonweb for looking for peoples adsense tools. DomainIQ provide information for domain pages Bannedcheck.com Social media: Linkedin Buzzsumo fantastic sm network tool.

In Episode #464, Eric and Neil discuss how to find new growth opportunities. Tune in to learn the websites you can visit that will help take you to that next level in your copy, landing page, and marketing strategies. You'll also find out why it's good to know what your competitors are up to.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: How to Find New Growth Opportunities 00:33 – If you're following marketing, you're continuing to learn 00:40 – Quora ads and LinkedIn ads are still considered semi-new in marketing 01:00 – Marketing School makes Eric and Neil stay relevant because they're accountable to their audience 01:13 – Learn and read around the space 01:25 – Assess your competitors using Ahrefs, SEMrush and BuiltWith 01:42 – Don't use ad blockers so you can see your competitors' ads 01:58 – Land-book is great place for landing page inspiration 02:07 – Go to Swiped.co for feedback regarding copy 02:15 – Facebook Groups like Badass Marketers and Founders is an engaging one 02:31 – com and Inbound.com will help you find new opportunities 02:45 – Go to conferences and events as well 02:58 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:09 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:15 v – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Learning should be constant—be willing to adapt to the ever changing technology today. Find growth opportunities by attending conferences and events and grow your network. Find out what works for your competitors so you can stay ahead. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #464, Eric and Neil discuss how to find new growth opportunities. Tune in to learn the websites you can visit that will help take you to that next level in your copy, landing page, and marketing strategies. You’ll also find out why it’s good to know what your competitors are up to.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Find New Growth Opportunities 00:33 – If you’re following marketing, you’re continuing to learn 00:40 – Quora ads and LinkedIn ads are still considered semi-new in marketing 01:00 – Marketing School makes Eric and Neil stay relevant because they’re accountable to their audience 01:13 – Learn and read around the space 01:25 – Assess your competitors using Ahrefs, SEMrush and BuiltWith 01:42 – Don’t use ad blockers so you can see your competitors’ ads 01:58 – Land-book is great place for landing page inspiration 02:07 – Go to Swiped.co for feedback regarding copy 02:15 – Facebook Groups like Badass Marketers and Founders is an engaging one 02:31 – com and Inbound.com will help you find new opportunities 02:45 – Go to conferences and events as well 02:58 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:09 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:15 v – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Learning should be constant—be willing to adapt to the ever changing technology today. Find growth opportunities by attending conferences and events and grow your network. Find out what works for your competitors so you can stay ahead. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #457, Eric and Neil discuss 7 tools to help with mobile conversion rate optimization. Tune in to hear about the tools that Eric and Neil stand behind and will ensure that your mobile game is operating at its finest!  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: 7 Tools To Help With Mobile CRO 00:40 – First tool is Crazy Egg which is a heat-mapping tool that helps you dissect your data in a visual format 01:01 – Second is Google Analytics on mobile which will help you increase your conversion rate 01:23 – Third is an email capture tool like Bounce Exchange, Hello Bar, Sumo and OptinMonster 01:45 – Fourth, survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform 02:03 – Fifth is BuiltWith, which is used to track your competitors’ marketing 02:47 – Sixth is Optimizely that enables you to do A/B testing for mobile 03:06 – Seventh is Google Page Speed—this makes sure your website loads fast 03:29 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:41 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:46 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Tracking your data on mobile makes it easier to know where you stand 24/7. Email marketing is still one of the best strategies that you can use today; make sure you have an email capturing tool to help you. Your conversion rate drops when your website is slow—make sure it’s loading at its fastest speed. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #457, Eric and Neil discuss 7 tools to help with mobile conversion rate optimization. Tune in to hear about the tools that Eric and Neil stand behind and will ensure that your mobile game is operating at its finest!  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: 7 Tools To Help With Mobile CRO 00:40 – First tool is Crazy Egg which is a heat-mapping tool that helps you dissect your data in a visual format 01:01 – Second is Google Analytics on mobile which will help you increase your conversion rate 01:23 – Third is an email capture tool like Bounce Exchange, Hello Bar, Sumo and OptinMonster 01:45 – Fourth, survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform 02:03 – Fifth is BuiltWith, which is used to track your competitors' marketing 02:47 – Sixth is Optimizely that enables you to do A/B testing for mobile 03:06 – Seventh is Google Page Speed—this makes sure your website loads fast 03:29 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:41 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:46 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Tracking your data on mobile makes it easier to know where you stand 24/7. Email marketing is still one of the best strategies that you can use today; make sure you have an email capturing tool to help you. Your conversion rate drops when your website is slow—make sure it's loading at its fastest speed. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #426, Eric and Neil discuss how to spy on your competition. Tune in to discover the tools that will help you see what your competitors are up to, how you can compete, and ways you can replicate their strategies. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Spy on Your Competition 00:38 – Ahrefs is a great tool to use 01:22 – SEMrush will show you phrases your competitors are bidding on for pay-per-click 01:40 – It will give you an idea of whether you should also be bidding on those keywords 02:14 – Adbeat goes deeper on ads and spend trends over time 02:41 – BuiltWith will show you everything that your competitors are using 03:07 – SimilarWeb will show you top categories, traffic trends and the breakdown of the traffic of a website 03:45 – SpyFu and iSpionage are great tools 03:50 – iSpionage shows the keyword efficiency index 04:42 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 04:56 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway for multiple entries 04:59 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Leverage the tools that will help you become BETTER than your competitors. Track to see if your strategies are working or if you’re just wasting your money. Spying on your competitors is healthy for a business. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #426, Eric and Neil discuss how to spy on your competition. Tune in to discover the tools that will help you see what your competitors are up to, how you can compete, and ways you can replicate their strategies. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: How to Spy on Your Competition 00:38 – Ahrefs is a great tool to use 01:22 – SEMrush will show you phrases your competitors are bidding on for pay-per-click 01:40 – It will give you an idea of whether you should also be bidding on those keywords 02:14 – Adbeat goes deeper on ads and spend trends over time 02:41 – BuiltWith will show you everything that your competitors are using 03:07 – SimilarWeb will show you top categories, traffic trends and the breakdown of the traffic of a website 03:45 – SpyFu and iSpionage are great tools 03:50 – iSpionage shows the keyword efficiency index 04:42 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 04:56 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway for multiple entries 04:59 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Leverage the tools that will help you become BETTER than your competitors. Track to see if your strategies are working or if you're just wasting your money. Spying on your competitors is healthy for a business. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Hoy hablamos de Builtwith, una base de datos que te informa sobre todas las tecnologías web de la web que le pidas, y vemos cómo usarlo.

Jonathan Epstein. He’s the current senior VP for international at Sentient Technologies, the maker of Sentient Ascend, the first conversion optimization solution that is powered by evolutionary artificial intelligence. Epstein has been in many companies at the forefront of technology and media including GameSpot, which he’s the founding CEO, and Omek which was sold to Intel and GameSpy which was eventually sold to IGN.   Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Hire With Your Head What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — BuiltWith and SimilarWeb How many hours of sleep do you get? — 5-6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wished I had stepped on entrepreneurship early”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:22 – Nathan introduces Jon to the show 02:18 – Jon’s good exit range is from tens of millions to the hundreds of million dollars 02:39 – Jon helped the founding CEO of Gamespot turn it around 03:18 – Jon has worked in an actual gaming company 03:29 – Jon started at IDG as magazine publisher 03:49 – GameSpot was the first professional online review site for games 03:56 – GameSpy had an editorial element and Jon published some of its software 04:35 – GameSpot was launched in 1995 04:45 – Jon launched the magazine Digital News and Multimedia World 04:53 – Jon was working for IDG when he launched the magazines under their brand 05:28 – Jon had great partners when he started GameSpot 05:55 – The initial idea came from the 2 co-founders 06:20 – It was clear that the internet thing was happening 06:30 – The problem, then, was that the release of the magazine came out way too late for newly released game reviews 06:55 – Having the magazine online is a better way to update the gamers 07:13 – GameSpot took in external investors 07:34 – GameSpot was sold for stock in ZDNet 08:09 – Jon had an international role and wanted to gain experience in dealing with other countries 08:16 – ZDNet had joint ventures and Jon had been with them for a while 08:34 – Jon had invested from ZDNet to GameSpy 09:04 – Jon had 8% of GameSpy 09:28 – Jon joined GameSpy in September 2001 09:32 – GameSpy was sold in March 2004 10:01 – Jon made around $61M cash from GameSpy’s exit 10:21 – Jon stayed with IGN after the exit and stayed there for a while 10:30 – Jon joined Double Fusion, which is a venture-backed startup 10:55 – Sentient had been around for 9 years and was one of the best funded companies 11:21 – Jon fell in love with Sentient because of their goals 11:29 – Sentient was built with a powerful AI platform 11:34 – It focuses on AI at scale and is able to run AI problems across millions of GPUs 11:58 – Sentient does multiple types of AI 12:00 – One is deep learning or neuron-network which is used for handwriting, voice recognition and image analysis 12:12 – Another product of Sentient is the evolutionary computation which is an AI that mimics natural selection 12:38 – Sentient ran a hedge fund using their products 12:51 – The fund size is growing rapidly 13:14 – Big investors invest to hedge funds in order to achieve stable, good returns 14:16 – Sentient is a SaaS business disrupting the world of AB testing 14:48 – Using the evolutionary AI approach speeds up AB testing 15:41 – Sentient currently has 25 paying customers 15:52 – Average contract price is $3K-30K a month 16:12 – Zero customer churn 16:24 – CAC 16:52 – Sentient is also doing paid advertising 16:56 – Sentient attends conversion conferences where they spend $5K-10K for sponsorship 17:40 – Sentient has raised a total of $143M 17:52 – Sentient has around 110 employees 17:58 – There are still 15-20 open positions 18:24 – Sentient was founded in 2007 18:57 – “We think it’s too early to sell” 19:15 – Mark Cuban said that the first trillionaires will come from AI 20:35 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Never be scared about exits – it just means new doors are opening for you. Be in a company that you’re really interested in—where you can align yourself with their goals. Start as early as you can when it comes to entrepreneurship.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

In Episode #222, Eric and Neil discuss the 7 free marketing tools that you ought to use. People oftentimes become overwhelmed about where to start with their marketing campaigns with little knowledge of the tools that are already at their disposal. Eric and Neil give you 7 free tools and describe what they are, how they add value to your website, and how they improve your ranking. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: 7 Free Marketing Tools that You Ought to Use 00:34 – First is Ubersuggest 00:38 – It is great for content generation 00:54 – Second is Google Tag Manager 01:05 – It makes adding tools to your website easier 01:15 – Make sure you have the right retargeting pixel and other pixels 01:46 – Collect the data 01:56 – HubSpot Sales 02:19 – It tracks your email and tells the receivers’ actions 02:33 – Mixmax will let you track, too 02:48 – You can personalize your outreach email 03:06 – You can integrate it with your team 03:20 – Yesware and HubSpot Sales does the same thing as Mixmax 03:35 – Google Webmaster Tool 03:50 – It allows you to see what is happening on your website 04:02 – BuiltWith tells you what your competition is doing, for free 04:25 – If you know what your competition is using, you might as well use it, as well! 04:35 – SimilarWeb is good for competitive analysis and it has a free and premium version 05:06 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: There are tons of free marketing tools available – sift through and find the ones that will be helpful to your site. Knowing your competitors behavior will help you improve your process. Email is still one of the best marketing channels out there - tracking and personalizing your emails is key in maximizing its utility. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #222, Eric and Neil discuss the 7 free marketing tools that you ought to use. People oftentimes become overwhelmed about where to start with their marketing campaigns with little knowledge of the tools that are already at their disposal. Eric and Neil give you 7 free tools and describe what they are, how they add value to your website, and how they improve your ranking. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: 7 Free Marketing Tools that You Ought to Use 00:34 – First is Ubersuggest 00:38 – It is great for content generation 00:54 – Second is Google Tag Manager 01:05 – It makes adding tools to your website easier 01:15 – Make sure you have the right retargeting pixel and other pixels 01:46 – Collect the data 01:56 – HubSpot Sales 02:19 – It tracks your email and tells the receivers' actions 02:33 – Mixmax will let you track, too 02:48 – You can personalize your outreach email 03:06 – You can integrate it with your team 03:20 – Yesware and HubSpot Sales does the same thing as Mixmax 03:35 – Google Webmaster Tool 03:50 – It allows you to see what is happening on your website 04:02 – BuiltWith tells you what your competition is doing, for free 04:25 – If you know what your competition is using, you might as well use it, as well! 04:35 – SimilarWeb is good for competitive analysis and it has a free and premium version 05:06 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: There are tons of free marketing tools available – sift through and find the ones that will be helpful to your site. Knowing your competitors behavior will help you improve your process. Email is still one of the best marketing channels out there - tracking and personalizing your emails is key in maximizing its utility. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Episode 543 Summary: In Episode #543, Nathan interviews Andrei Breaz. He’s the founder and CEO of Bant.io which is a B2B leads company. Before that, he was the founder of Keptify, which was acquired by Well Investments. He also worked as the CTO of Harty Hanks and is highly experienced in the B2B sales space. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Think and Grow Rich What CEO do you follow? –  Anthony Robbins and Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Trello Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Andrei wished he would have caught the entrepreneurial bug sooner   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:50 – Nathan introduces Andrei to the show 02:25 – Bant initiates conversations for companies with their ideal prospects 03:10 – Bant is a service model and not a SaaS model 03:47 – Bant is on the prospecting and lead generation stage 04:05 – Bant doesn’t sell data 04:10 – Bant uses the data they generate using their own software 04:35 – The distinct data points that Bant uses 05:10 – Average customer pay per month is $1200 05:39 – The price reflects a medium plan which is a customized plan 05:44 – There’s 100% money-back guarantee 06:00 – Andrei shares their definition of a hot lead 07:13 – Bant was launched in early 2015 07:30 – Bant is self-funded 08:00 – Number of current customers 09:08 – MRR 09:30 – Andrei is aiming for $1.5M next year 09:34 – 2015 total revenue 10:10 – Bant’s actual clients 10:25 – Most are SMBs 10:50 – Team size and location 11:10 – Bant gets their customers from referrals and word of mouth 11:30 – Bant ran a $ 200 adword campaign when they started 11:41 – Andrei shares Bant’s process 12:28 – LTV 12:55 – Bant’s CAC is marginal 13:10 – No sales team, but there are account managers 14:18 – Monthly gross customer churn 15:10 – Bant has their own database and has researchers who validate their leads 15:55 – 8 contractors on research 16:03 – 3rd party data apps that Bant is using including Builtwith 16:50 – Andrei shares LinkedIn as one of their main data sources 17:15 – Andrei shares his thoughts regarding LinkedIn being acquired by Microsoft 18:55 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Do NOT rely on just one large source of data, have a variety of sources. Businesses can spend less time hiring the right people if they go through right channels providing the right prospects.  Once the entrepreneurial bug bites you—just go for it.   Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox  – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11” secure even when he left it in the airplane’s back seat pocket Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Evan Liang, CEO of LeanData talks about getting agile with lead routing and their massive stack including: Builtwith, Datanize, Yesware, Outreach, SalesLoft, Persist IQ, Trello, SFDC, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Zoom, Capterra, UberFlip, DocuSign and Marketo! To learn more visit: www.stackandflow.io www.infer.com

In Episode #34 Eric and Neil discuss how to perform a competitive analysis. This process is not just a way to steal from your competitors—it's also a great way to motivate your team to see where you're lacking and start making changes. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:22 – How you can do a competitive analysis. 00:45 – If you use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can find top performing pages. 01:10 – See what you can steal from those pages. 01:45 – An example: Companies using a hub-and-spoke model 02:40 – The BuiltWith Tool 03:04 – WhatRunsWhere captures your competition's ads 03:20 –SEMrush tells you the keywords your customers are bidding on. 04:19 – Using ahrefs to look at a monthly graph and see how many links your competitor is adding 05:20 – Moz to compare competitors side by side 05:50 – You can show your team where you are lacking and ultimately drive action. 06:30 – Go to NeilPatel.com for his social media analysis tool. 07:35 – Use SimilarWeb to see even more details of your competitors. 08:15 – Don't do too much at once. 08:25 – Pick one category and compare what you're doing to your competitors. 08:45 – See you tomorrow! 3 Key Points: Make yourself aware of the resources available to you for competitive analyses. Use competitive analysis to drive your own team to change. Pick one marketing category at a time to see what your competitors are doing. Resources Mentioned: SEMrush, Ahrefs, BuiltWith, WhatRunsWhere, Moz, and SimilarWeb – All valuable resources to help you see what your competitors are doing for their marketing. NeilPatel.com – Access to a social media analysis tool Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #34 Eric and Neil discuss how to perform a competitive analysis. This process is not just a way to steal from your competitors—it’s also a great way to motivate your team to see where you’re lacking and start making changes. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:22 – How you can do a competitive analysis. 00:45 – If you use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can find top performing pages. 01:10 – See what you can steal from those pages. 01:45 – An example: Companies using a hub-and-spoke model 02:40 – The BuiltWith Tool 03:04 – WhatRunsWhere captures your competition’s ads 03:20 –SEMrush tells you the keywords your customers are bidding on. 04:19 – Using ahrefs to look at a monthly graph and see how many links your competitor is adding 05:20 – Moz to compare competitors side by side 05:50 – You can show your team where you are lacking and ultimately drive action. 06:30 – Go to NeilPatel.com for his social media analysis tool. 07:35 – Use SimilarWeb to see even more details of your competitors. 08:15 – Don’t do too much at once. 08:25 – Pick one category and compare what you’re doing to your competitors. 08:45 – See you tomorrow! 3 Key Points: Make yourself aware of the resources available to you for competitive analyses. Use competitive analysis to drive your own team to change. Pick one marketing category at a time to see what your competitors are doing. Resources Mentioned: SEMrush, Ahrefs, BuiltWith, WhatRunsWhere, Moz, and SimilarWeb – All valuable resources to help you see what your competitors are doing for their marketing. NeilPatel.com – Access to a social media analysis tool Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Here's a quick recap of everything I shared during my lunch consultation today. On today's episode Russell shares some cool things he shared with some clients at a lunch consultation. Hear all that good stuff in just 7 minutes… Here are 3 cool things in this episode: How funnels on line basically replicate funnels in real life, but how it's cheaper. How Russell gets leads into his funnels. And why you need to create desire and belief to get ads to convert. So listen below to hear about Russell's seven minute lunch consultation. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey guys and gals, this is actually the second Marketing In Your Car I've done today. Do you wanna know why? Because I'm in my car again and I'm driving, so because of that you get to get me again, because I had nothing else to do. I just wanted to share with you guys. I had a really cool lunch today with, there's a company called Kount K O U N T, which is a really cool fraud protection company, and the CEO is one of my close friends, he used to be the CEO of Clickbank, in fact, Clickbank and Kount are owned by the same company. Anyway, I had a chance to go eat lunch with them today, which was really fun to get to know the guys and their sales team and marketing team and stuff. I enjoyed it, and I learned some cool things, not things that I learned, but I shared some cool things with them that I think would be good for everyone so I just wanted to share some of the thoughts and ideas that came from it. Hopefully it'll give you guys some value. The first question they asked me, “Clickfunnels sounds cool, but we're selling BDB. With BDB, do funnels work, is that just a BDC type thing?” and it made me laugh because first thing I said, “Cool, how do you guys get clients in the door right now?” He actually used the word funnel, “Well the first step of our funnel is…” Then I kind of smiled and then he explained the whole thing, “We go to trade shows and we get leads, and we put the leads, and these guys call the leads, and leads forum, and then leads score guys, and if they're good they go to these guys and then sell to them.” I kind of smiled, I'm like, “Okay well that was a funnel right there. All we're trying online is replicate that. How do we make it so that instead of you having to have a guy or a gal or somebody do each of those steps, a lot of those things happen online.” I told him about how back in the day, some of you guys know my story, we had a call center that had 60 full time sales people who were outbound calling every one of our leads find people qualify them and all those kinds of things. And while that worked, it was expensive. That's a lot of people. Everybody had to dial 100 dials a day and all that jazz. It was just super inefficient, expensive and honestly, wasn't a great experience for people. People don't want to get phone calls all day long. So when we shut down the call center, we reinvented the model and kind of changed it around. We started driving traffic into a funnel, the funnel sifted and sorted and qualified people and just gave us leads and customers who were ready to sign up today. And that was the transition, that's how it kind of moved. We went from having 60 full time sales guys to now we have two.  While they don't do quite the same top line revenue, they definitely do more profit. Considering two guys versus 60 its pretty dang close to the top line, which is exciting. Anyway, I think that was cool illustration of a funnel. So the next question was, “How do you guys get leads into your funnel?” So we kind of talked about that a little bit, I was like, “We're doing a little bit of everything. We're trying a lot of things. We have a Facebook ads that run.” And theyre like, “Facebook ads don't run for us.” I' m like, “Really? Why not?” they kind of talked about their messaging on it, and their messaging was very specific li,e, “Hey you can increase your transaction value for this.” I was like, that's not what people are looking for. Your product is fraud protection you've got to create a desire in their minds. When we launched Clickfunnels initially we started selling like, here's funnel software. And nobody bought it no matter how excited I was. We had to change it. How to get people excited about funnel software. We had to explain what a funnel was and get them excited and show examples of your funnels and what's actually possible. And that's why I built the funnel hacks webinar. To show them, here's what a funnel is. Here's how it works. Here's how you funnel hack somebody else. Here's how you go to Clickfunnels and actually build it, and here's how you get traffic. I gotta create desire and belief that what I have is gonna actually help somebody.” And I showed them that the reason that your Facebook ads not working is because you're not creating desire or belief. That's another goal of funnel, it could be through a sales video, it could be through a webinar, it could be through whatever, but you gotta create desire and belief, those are the two core things you've got to create through your funnel. That's the goal, if your funnel can create desire in the thing that you sell, and belief that it will work for them. Notice that I didn't say, not that it'll work, but it'll work for them, that's how you get ads to convert. So that was the next thing. Then we talked about other ways to get leads, and all the things we were doing. I asked them, “One of the things we're doing, we're building out kind of a front end call center, who are going to call leads and start selling our programs. Have you guys ever heard of billwith.com?” they said, “Yes, we used builtwith.com but it didn't really work.” I'm like, “How did it not work?” they said, “we had guys exporting lists of hundreds of thousands of leads and they were calling them all day and getting 1800 numbers and dead calls and things like that. So if you guys know builtwith. Builtwith.com is this site where you can say, hey show me all the sites that were built with Leadpages, show me all the sites that were built Unbound, show me all the pages that were built with Infusionsoft. It shows you all the pages and then gives you full the contact info of those people. I said, “That's the problem. You've got these sales guys that are cold calling all these unqualified, cold, freezing cold leads. I don't want my sales guys talking to anybody unless they've raised their hand. There's a really cool business model that we're implementing right now that you guys should look at. It's a book called Predictable Revenue. I think I've mentioned it to you guys before in the past, but if not go to predictablerevenue.com, I believe, and go buy the book, it's like a $10 book. The books not really well written but the concept is awesome. So what they do in this book, it kind of documents the case study of how sales went from 0 to $100 million in sales and they did it basically, getting lists that they knew had builtwith.com. conceptually the same thing. You get this cold call list and instead of just having your sales dudes just call and burn sales out, you have the sales guy take 100 leads and then email 100 people and say, “Hey are the person in charge of marketing at this company?” and typically the person is like, “No I am not. So and so's in charge of marketing.” Then they introduce them to so and so. Now the person's got a warm introduction to the person who's in charge of that aspect of the business and that opens up a great call. Then you're only calling people who've raised their hands and said, “Hey, I'm Joe and I'm the marketing guy you're looking for. Let's get on a phone call and talk.”  So your sales guys are only talking to people that are warm. So that book, I think the model and I don't know exactly the numbers, each sales guy emails 100 people a day, from that they should get 11 responses and from that they should have 6 calls or whatever. And they just kind of….that's the model. Now your sales guys aren't trying to make 100 dials a day. Your sales guys are sending 100 emails and talking to 11 people who actually raised their hands. It makes for a better experience and way more profitability and less headaches and costs, and all the things that are associated with the other model. That was kind of another little tidbit and idea. There you go guys. There is the end product of our lunch consult for today, I did with the Kount guys. I hope it gives you guys some ideas for your business on the funnel process, converting ads, different places, different way outside of just Facebook to get leads. A cool conversion process to convert those leads and a bunch of other things. So there you go. Seven minutes and fifteen seconds of gold I hope I dropped on you guys. If you get some value out of that, let me know. Share this episode on Facebook or whatever that would be sweet. If you want to see any back episodes go to marketinginyourcar.com, You can find all the old episodes. Get the transcripts to the old shows and a bunch of other amazing things. Again, I appreciate you guys, Hope you enjoyed our seven minute lunch consult. Talk soon.

Here’s a quick recap of everything I shared during my lunch consultation today. On today’s episode Russell shares some cool things he shared with some clients at a lunch consultation. Hear all that good stuff in just 7 minutes… Here are 3 cool things in this episode: How funnels on line basically replicate funnels in real life, but how it’s cheaper. How Russell gets leads into his funnels. And why you need to create desire and belief to get ads to convert. So listen below to hear about Russell’s seven minute lunch consultation. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey guys and gals, this is actually the second Marketing In Your Car I’ve done today. Do you wanna know why? Because I’m in my car again and I’m driving, so because of that you get to get me again, because I had nothing else to do. I just wanted to share with you guys. I had a really cool lunch today with, there’s a company called Kount K O U N T, which is a really cool fraud protection company, and the CEO is one of my close friends, he used to be the CEO of Clickbank, in fact, Clickbank and Kount are owned by the same company. Anyway, I had a chance to go eat lunch with them today, which was really fun to get to know the guys and their sales team and marketing team and stuff. I enjoyed it, and I learned some cool things, not things that I learned, but I shared some cool things with them that I think would be good for everyone so I just wanted to share some of the thoughts and ideas that came from it. Hopefully it’ll give you guys some value. The first question they asked me, “Clickfunnels sounds cool, but we’re selling BDB. With BDB, do funnels work, is that just a BDC type thing?” and it made me laugh because first thing I said, “Cool, how do you guys get clients in the door right now?” He actually used the word funnel, “Well the first step of our funnel is…” Then I kind of smiled and then he explained the whole thing, “We go to trade shows and we get leads, and we put the leads, and these guys call the leads, and leads forum, and then leads score guys, and if they’re good they go to these guys and then sell to them.” I kind of smiled, I’m like, “Okay well that was a funnel right there. All we’re trying online is replicate that. How do we make it so that instead of you having to have a guy or a gal or somebody do each of those steps, a lot of those things happen online.” I told him about how back in the day, some of you guys know my story, we had a call center that had 60 full time sales people who were outbound calling every one of our leads find people qualify them and all those kinds of things. And while that worked, it was expensive. That’s a lot of people. Everybody had to dial 100 dials a day and all that jazz. It was just super inefficient, expensive and honestly, wasn’t a great experience for people. People don’t want to get phone calls all day long. So when we shut down the call center, we reinvented the model and kind of changed it around. We started driving traffic into a funnel, the funnel sifted and sorted and qualified people and just gave us leads and customers who were ready to sign up today. And that was the transition, that’s how it kind of moved. We went from having 60 full time sales guys to now we have two.  While they don’t do quite the same top line revenue, they definitely do more profit. Considering two guys versus 60 its pretty dang close to the top line, which is exciting. Anyway, I think that was cool illustration of a funnel. So the next question was, “How do you guys get leads into your funnel?” So we kind of talked about that a little bit, I was like, “We’re doing a little bit of everything. We’re trying a lot of things. We have a Facebook ads that run.” And theyre like, “Facebook ads don’t run for us.” I’ m like, “Really? Why not?” they kind of talked about their messaging on it, and their messaging was very specific li,e, “Hey you can increase your transaction value for this.” I was like, that’s not what people are looking for. Your product is fraud protection you’ve got to create a desire in their minds. When we launched Clickfunnels initially we started selling like, here’s funnel software. And nobody bought it no matter how excited I was. We had to change it. How to get people excited about funnel software. We had to explain what a funnel was and get them excited and show examples of your funnels and what’s actually possible. And that’s why I built the funnel hacks webinar. To show them, here’s what a funnel is. Here’s how it works. Here’s how you funnel hack somebody else. Here’s how you go to Clickfunnels and actually build it, and here’s how you get traffic. I gotta create desire and belief that what I have is gonna actually help somebody.” And I showed them that the reason that your Facebook ads not working is because you’re not creating desire or belief. That’s another goal of funnel, it could be through a sales video, it could be through a webinar, it could be through whatever, but you gotta create desire and belief, those are the two core things you’ve got to create through your funnel. That’s the goal, if your funnel can create desire in the thing that you sell, and belief that it will work for them. Notice that I didn’t say, not that it’ll work, but it’ll work for them, that’s how you get ads to convert. So that was the next thing. Then we talked about other ways to get leads, and all the things we were doing. I asked them, “One of the things we’re doing, we’re building out kind of a front end call center, who are going to call leads and start selling our programs. Have you guys ever heard of billwith.com?” they said, “Yes, we used builtwith.com but it didn’t really work.” I’m like, “How did it not work?” they said, “we had guys exporting lists of hundreds of thousands of leads and they were calling them all day and getting 1800 numbers and dead calls and things like that. So if you guys know builtwith. Builtwith.com is this site where you can say, hey show me all the sites that were built with Leadpages, show me all the sites that were built Unbound, show me all the pages that were built with Infusionsoft. It shows you all the pages and then gives you full the contact info of those people. I said, “That’s the problem. You’ve got these sales guys that are cold calling all these unqualified, cold, freezing cold leads. I don’t want my sales guys talking to anybody unless they’ve raised their hand. There’s a really cool business model that we’re implementing right now that you guys should look at. It’s a book called Predictable Revenue. I think I’ve mentioned it to you guys before in the past, but if not go to predictablerevenue.com, I believe, and go buy the book, it’s like a $10 book. The books not really well written but the concept is awesome. So what they do in this book, it kind of documents the case study of how sales went from 0 to $100 million in sales and they did it basically, getting lists that they knew had builtwith.com. conceptually the same thing. You get this cold call list and instead of just having your sales dudes just call and burn sales out, you have the sales guy take 100 leads and then email 100 people and say, “Hey are the person in charge of marketing at this company?” and typically the person is like, “No I am not. So and so’s in charge of marketing.” Then they introduce them to so and so. Now the person’s got a warm introduction to the person who’s in charge of that aspect of the business and that opens up a great call. Then you’re only calling people who’ve raised their hands and said, “Hey, I’m Joe and I’m the marketing guy you’re looking for. Let’s get on a phone call and talk.”  So your sales guys are only talking to people that are warm. So that book, I think the model and I don’t know exactly the numbers, each sales guy emails 100 people a day, from that they should get 11 responses and from that they should have 6 calls or whatever. And they just kind of….that’s the model. Now your sales guys aren’t trying to make 100 dials a day. Your sales guys are sending 100 emails and talking to 11 people who actually raised their hands. It makes for a better experience and way more profitability and less headaches and costs, and all the things that are associated with the other model. That was kind of another little tidbit and idea. There you go guys. There is the end product of our lunch consult for today, I did with the Kount guys. I hope it gives you guys some ideas for your business on the funnel process, converting ads, different places, different way outside of just Facebook to get leads. A cool conversion process to convert those leads and a bunch of other things. So there you go. Seven minutes and fifteen seconds of gold I hope I dropped on you guys. If you get some value out of that, let me know. Share this episode on Facebook or whatever that would be sweet. If you want to see any back episodes go to marketinginyourcar.com, You can find all the old episodes. Get the transcripts to the old shows and a bunch of other amazing things. Again, I appreciate you guys, Hope you enjoyed our seven minute lunch consult. Talk soon.

Check out RailsClips and Angular Remote Conf!   01:39 - Purchase Criteria 08:09 - At what point to do you switch/kill off/upgrade services and/or hardware? Lost Productivity Costs 21:03 - Justifying Big Equipment/Furniture Purchases 32:58 - Try Before You Buy 37:04 - Travel Expenses 47:33 - Quality = Positive Return On Investment (ROI) Self-Representation      Products and Services Referenced During This Episode: BuiltWith Edgar Buffer Basecamp Dropbox CleanMyMac Synology Drobo Emacs Keynote IPython Notebook Uber Picks ExpressVPN (Reuven) Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose (Reuven) CommitStrip: A Very Common Coder’s Youthful Mistake (Eric) Paul Jarvis: The one thing every aspiring freelancer, college student or person with access to a time machine should know (Eric) Amazon Echo (Jonathan) 1-877-223-0342 (Chuck) freelancershow.com/15minutes (Chuck)

Check out RailsClips and Angular Remote Conf!   01:39 - Purchase Criteria 08:09 - At what point to do you switch/kill off/upgrade services and/or hardware? Lost Productivity Costs 21:03 - Justifying Big Equipment/Furniture Purchases 32:58 - Try Before You Buy 37:04 - Travel Expenses 47:33 - Quality = Positive Return On Investment (ROI) Self-Representation      Products and Services Referenced During This Episode: BuiltWith Edgar Buffer Basecamp Dropbox CleanMyMac Synology Drobo Emacs Keynote IPython Notebook Uber Picks ExpressVPN (Reuven) Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose (Reuven) CommitStrip: A Very Common Coder’s Youthful Mistake (Eric) Paul Jarvis: The one thing every aspiring freelancer, college student or person with access to a time machine should know (Eric) Amazon Echo (Jonathan) 1-877-223-0342 (Chuck) freelancershow.com/15minutes (Chuck)

Existen muchas herramientas que nos permiten analizar el SEO de una web, distintos factores de marketing online… pero ¿y la parte técnica?. Aunque desde marketing no se le suele prestar gran atención, es importante conocer el perfil técnico tanto de nuestra web como de los competidores, para poder analizar en qué debemos mejorar.

Existen muchas herramientas que nos permiten analizar el SEO de una web, distintos factores de marketing online… pero ¿y la parte técnica?. Aunque desde marketing no se le suele prestar gran atención, es importante conocer el perfil técnico tanto de nuestra web como de los competidores, para poder analizar en qué debemos mejorar.

  Kim Gjerstad is one of four founders of MailPoet, an email newsletter plugin for WordPress. According to BuiltWith, MailPoet is installed on over 94K websites at the time of writing. Let's learn how Kim and his team have used the freemium model to grow their business and the challenges they have faced along the way. The post Episode #68 Kim Gjerstad from MailPoet appeared first on WP Elevation.

The SuccessLab Podcast is back with Episode #34! I'm in the lab with Patrick Mathieson, a venture capitalist at Toba Capital. We talk all things venture capital and how entrepreneurs can get the funding they need. 1. Can you tell us a bit about your journey and what you do at Toba Capital? I met, pretty randomly, an entrepreneur that had a startup and hit it off with him. While I was getting to know him, his company got acquired by Dell—a big, nine-figure acquisition. After they got acquired, they grew very quickly within Dell, and when they grew sufficiently, they were looking to hire new people, and they had a role for me. That entrepreneur who started that company eventually left, after putting in his three years at Dell, and shortly thereafter became a partner at Toba Capital. Because he and I worked together for a really long time, I had the chance to come with him as well. 2. How do you typically work with startups? When your team first starts working with a startup, how involved do you guys get in making sure they have a solid foundation in place? The short answer is, it totally depends. At the very beginning, the way that you find companies that are interesting totally varies. There's services that exist specifically for that. On the other hand, you have things like, "Oh, my old college roommate is working in Austin, Texas at this startup," and we catch up just casually over a beer or something. So there's this funky blending of your personal and your professional life in this profession because you're kind of always on. 3. How can startups evaluate if they do in fact need investor capital, and how much they might need? I think that right now, at least in the technology industry, there's too much emphasis on raising outside money. By that I mean there's too much emphasis on people like us. If you go on Tech Crunch and look at the front page, it's all, "Company Raised An Enormous Amount of Money." We're celebrating the fundraising, but in reality, not every company needs to be built in a way that requires tons of outside capital. You should think really carefully about if there's different ways to accomplish what you're trying to do without giving away a big slice of equity in your company. 4. You mentioned you often work with your startups on generating more leads and tightening up leaks in their lead gen. Can you provide a few tips or best practices? The first thing we do is look at their messaging and how they are positioning their product. We generally think that is the most important thing, from the marketing side, that companies can do. The way that you describe your product to customers affects everything in the marketing process. 5. Are there any tips or tools you can recommend for entrepreneurs? Anything you're loving right now? We have a tool called ClearSlide. It's meant for web presentations and screensharing. ClearSlide's a company in our portfolio that's doing really well and growing really quickly, and their product is getting awesome. If you're interested in what makes up term sheets, the best resource out there is Venture Deals by Brad Feld. Slack is a chat and internal communication tool. Seems like everyone's using it now. For general knowledge, I think everybody should be on Quora. There's so much good content on Quora, whether it's about business, or politics, or fitness, there are experts on pretty much anything. 6. How can people get in touch with you? I do the vast majority of my writing on Quora. You can follow or message me there. If you're running a technology growth company, please check out TobaCapital.com. There's some information about how to contact us at the bottom of the page. Please don't hesitate to get in touch!   This Week's Biz Hack: BuiltWith Gives You The Scoop On Your Favorite Sites Have you ever been on a site and wondered what tools they are using? Maybe you wanted to integrate a similar feature on your site but didn't know how. BuiltWith has a really cool Chrome plugin that allows you see what exactly they are using. Once you've installed the plugin, you can navigate to any site, hit the plugin icon at the top of your toolbar, and a dropdown box will appear with all the info. Much easier than trying to search through code to figure it out. BuiltWith is a software that allows you to generate leads, conduct market analysis and gain sales intelligence. That software comes with a fairly pricey monthly cost, but there are some great trend reports on their site you can check out for free. It's worth a look. Action Item: Change "I Can't" to "I Don't." When it comes to maintaining laser focus and productivity, we often hear you should say “no” more. The challenge is it's tough to do and even tougher to stick with it. But as it turns out, how you say “no” can impact your success rate for sticking with it. This applies more to creating new habits and resisting temptations as opposed to saying no to a friend who asks you for a ride to the airport. The trick is to say “I don't…” rather than “I can't.” Actual research has been conducted on this: Students who told themselves “I can't eat X” gave into temptation 61% of the time, whereas the students who said “I don't eat X” only gave in 36% of the time. This simple shift in terminology helped them stick with it over the long haul. The term “I can't…” is also a reminder of limitations, whereas “I don't…” is more empowering. It's an affirmation. So your action item this week is to practice awareness when it comes to saying “no.” Every time you find yourself saying “I can't,” change it to an “I don't” statement. “I don't schedule meetings Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.” “I don't work passed 8 p.m.” “I don't browse Facebook between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.” You get the idea. Quote of the Week “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci   Next week, I'm in The Lab with Evo Terra. He is one of the early adopters of podcasting. He co-authored Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies in 2007 and Podcasting for Dummies in 2008. He's also gone on to author other books and is the co-founder of Podiobooks.com, as well as a business consultation company for startups and entrepreneurs called Big Bounce. Currently he and his wife are traveling around the world. They took off on their adventure earlier this month and tracking it all at ShEvo.wtf. Be sure to tune in! Until then, have prosperous week!