Podcasts about online geniuses

Online Geniuses is THE largest Slack community for marketers. They have over 38,000 members from 100 countries. It consists of an army of marketers—CMOs, Digital Marketing Directors, Owners of Agencies—from around the world engaging in one centralized slack channel. You have the knowledge base of the world's marketers at your fingertips. Online communities are the future of networking. How can your brand leverage slack communities? How can you personally benefit from a Slack community? Michael Cadieux and David Feinman share the immense benefits in this episode of The Content Callout.Outline of This Episode[1:52] Learn more about Online Geniuses and Procurement Foundry[4:45] Mike's rapid-fire tips for marketers[9:09] David's rapid-fire tips for marketers[13:23] Community building takes a community [15:38] Who is the Online Geniuses Slack community built for?[16:20] How to network the right way in online communities[18:12] What you can expect from the communities[25:40] How to share new technologies with Online Geniuses[29:23] Why experience design matters in online communities[31:20] The #1 thing marketers should be doing that they don't[35:40] How to learn more about Mike, David, and Online GeniusesResources & People MentionedOnline GeniusesProcurement FoundryLoomConnect with Michael CadieuxConnect on LinkedInConnect with David FeinmanConnect on LinkedInFollow on TwitterConnect with The Content Callouthttps://www.contentcallout.com/Subscribe to The Content Callout onApple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts

This week's featured guest is Paul Shapiro, founder of Online Geniuses, a Slack Chat-based community for internet marketers. He is a programmer and is very fond of horror movies and board games. In fact, he also operates a board game blog. He was on our show back March 2016, when we first discussed AMP on the show. This episode we discussed all things SEO. Tune-in to learn more about SEO during the EDGE of the Web episode 370. Key topics discussed during the show: Agency vs in-house SEO Developing in-house SEO tools Machine learning & SEO SEO pro tip

David Markovich is a marketer, community builder, and consultant. He is the founder of  Online Geniuses with over 25,000 members in his digital marketing community. He is also the co-founder of 18percentcommunity which is a mental health community and CoronaHub which is also an online community dedicated to confronting the massive worldwide burden caused by the Coronavirus. As an expert in building communities, David shared some tips on how to create one and consistently grow it into a larger number. One of them is determining the right application to use for your community. “Anything under like 200 people, I usually choose WhatsApp. I think they're getting it on their phone and their notification provides better engagement and for anything bigger, I use Slack.” According to David, WhatsApp is good for those who are just starting to create a community because the features of the application are suitable for small communities. Then, you can switch to slack when your community begins to grow bigger. “Don’t charge. Get everyone in and then, figure out what to do with monetization.” David has testified that it is a disadvantage for the growth of the community to charge them. Many people start giving charges once they had huge members in the community. One reason is to avoid spams or to filter other stuff but this is actually wrong. Giving a price will only hinder your community to grow bigger. He said that he prefers a community free of charge. He practically does other ways to prevent spams in their community and keep high-quality standards inside. “There's a website called explodingtopics.com—and also Google Trends.“ Both of them are always being compared in finding the right keywords or content topics for social media marketing and influencers. The difference between them is the process of how you will obtain a trending hot topic.  That’s all for this article. Check the full episode to get more tips from David. Subscribe to our email newsletter to be notified of our upcoming live-streamed interviews! Join our Discord community and become part of the conversation! https://www.whyinfluence.com/

Cold email has gotten a bad rap in the marketing community, but there's a way to do it right (and get great results). This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, email copywriting expert Nikki Elbaz talks about cold email outreach. As a copywriting expert, and the email copywriter for Copyhackers, Nikki advises B2B SaaS companies on how to write emails that generate leads and sales, and she says there are definitely good use cases for cold email outreach. In this conversation, Nikki shares when you should use cold email, how to build your strategy, tips for writing subject lines and email body copy, the KPIs you should use to measure success and more. Highlights from my conversation with Nikki include: There's a perception in the marketing world that you shouldn't do cold email, but Nikki says that's really not the case and there are some good reasons to include it in your marketing strategy. The two primary use cases for cold email are for companies that are struggling to grow and acquire customers, and companies that want to invest in relationship building (acquiring leverage and influence and authority). Before starting any cold email outreach, Nikki recommends talking with your legal counsel to ensure you're in compliance with GDPR and other similar rules. Any piece of marketing is made up of list, offer, and creative. Nikki says you need to begin by identifying what your offer is and who you are targeting. Once you have that done, you can work on your email copy. Copy always first comes with research, which involves digging into who those people are and why they need what you offer, and framing in a friendly, authentic, honest, open way.  More important than creativity when writing cold emails is making sure that you have something that the person is interested in and needs, and framing it that way, and just being respectful of their inbox, of their time, and who they are as a person, and their role. When it comes to email copywriting, Nikki follows "The Rule of One," which holds that you want to pretend you're writing to one person, so being very human, and writing the way that you talk. Marketing emails should never be "one and done." Testing is crucial and should be done on an ongoing basis to ensure your emails are getting results. When working with cold email, its important for your audience to be homogenous, so it is often worthwhile to pair down longer lists into smaller, more similar segments. Your offer is a key part of your cold email outreach strategy, and Nikki says its important for the offer to be something that it is very easy for the recipient to say "yes" to. Resources from this episode: Visit NikkiElbaz.com Check out the CopyHackers website Visit Nikki's new project, unmassmarket.com Listen to the podcast to learn more about how to write cold emails that get results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host, and this week my guest is Nikki Elbaz, who is an email conversion copywriting specialist, but I also want to say you're sort of like a jack of all email trades, trades email person. I don't know how to say it, but your bio is so interesting that I didn't even want to attempt to summarize it. I thought you could do a better job of telling the story of what you do, and where you do it, and who it's for. Welcome. Nikki Elbaz (Guest): Thank you. That's one way of putting being a jack of all trades. Nikki and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Actually, I want to back up. I shouldn't say that because that makes you sound like a generalist, which you're really not, and that's part of why I was excited to talk to you, because you really have taken a deep dive into email and what makes it work. So, with that- Meet Nikki Elbaz Nikki: Cool. Oh, okay. So, yes. So, number one is I run my own email marketing company called Nikki Elbaz. Very creative name, I know. So, working with private SaaS clients and just doing all sorts of email sequences for SaaS brands, basically. SaaS especially has tons of different customer journeys and all that, so email is a lot of fun, and that's what we do at Nikki Elbaz. I am also the email specialist, the copywriter, the email copywriter at Copyhackers, which is a huge honor and privilege because Copyhackers is awesome, and again, we have all sorts of interesting, really fun clients that we work with, and all sorts of amazing different types of sequences, and just digging into stuff is just a lot of fun. So, those are my two main gigs, and I'm also launching something pretty soon with another email copywriter. Her name is Sophia Dagnon, and we are launching unmassmarket.com, and it's just going to be a place for learning for email marketing, or SaaS founders and marketers, just techniques, templates. Hopefully, one day we'll do courses, all sorts of just... Just a place to learn about email marketing for SaaS, because we didn't find it ourselves, so we are creating it. What any marketer can learn from SaaS marketing Kathleen: That's great. One of the reasons I'm really interested to talk with you is, even though you do a lot of work for SaaS, I have always thought... Because I've talked to other people who do SaaS marketing, and I think it's easy for marketers to listen and think, "Well, I don't do SaaS marketing, so this will not be applicable to me," but I have always found it interesting because I at least find that all of the lessons from SaaS marketing are totally applicable everywhere else. It's just SaaS, in many respects, has so much more pressure on it because for so many SaaS companies, it is a sale without a salesperson. So, the marketing itself has to do the job, in many cases, that a person would. So, it's like if something can work in SaaS, it's going to work anywhere. Right? Nikki: Yeah. Yep. Kathleen: In mind, at least. That's how I always think about it, but I don't know. I would love to get your take on that. Nikki: 100%, 100%. I actually was focused more on e-commerce for a while, and I just kept coming to so many objections with clients where I was... just too many conversations about, "Yes, this will work. Can we just try it? Let's test it. Let's do it," and the trust just wasn't there. With SaaS marketers, there's just so much more trust and willing to test things and try things and just do things, maybe because of the pressure, maybe just because of the culture of SaaS, where it's exciting and people are just into trying cool things and reading cool blogs and doing all this talking with each other. So, definitely, I was always wanting to bring SaaS tactics to other industry, and I wish more industries followed what SaaS companies are doing and started implementing them. They're just so human. They're so engaging and relevant, and yeah, it's fun, and I think people really respond to that. You'll see it in certain... especially in D2C brands, where they do kind of copy what SaaS brands do, especially the subscription boxes and things like that. You see that they get great engagement, and they get great brand loyalty, and I wish everyone would just become a SaaS marketer, even if they're not SaaS marketers. Kathleen: Yeah. Well, I think all of those really, e-commerce, D2C, SaaS, have in common that in some ways they're like touchless sales. Right? So, for all of those, the marketing materials, the assets, the emails, the ad copy, et cetera, it all has to speak for itself without the explanation of a human to back it up, or the persuasiveness of a human to back it up. I mean, yes, there are humans behind all of those things, but in so many cases the interaction that a prospective customer has is just with your marketing. So, you can't mess it up. It can't be plain vanilla, wishy-washy. So, I totally agree. I think it's fun to work in SaaS, and there are so many lessons to be taken away. So, if you're listening and you're not in SaaS, do not stop listening. I mean, this is going to be full of great advice. Before we came on, we were talking about... We're both members of Online Geniuses, which is a really big Slack group for marketers. It's great, tons of great information, great resource, and it's not just Online Geniuses. There's so many other Slack groups for marketers and Facebook groups for marketers, and you were saying something I found really interesting about a trend that you've noticed lately, and maybe you could talk a little bit more about that. The controversy around cold email Nikki: Yes, definitely, and yeah, I for sure have noticed this in basically all of the Slack groups. So, I always check out the email channels, because that's my thing, and what comes up again and again and again is questions around cold email, wanting to hear about techniques, wanting to hear about platforms to use, wanting to hear about engagement, all just questions around cold email. Somebody will inevitably respond, "Don't do cold email. Cold email is just... It's not a good technique. Don't do it. Inbound marketing, that's the way to go. Didn't you read Permission Marketing? Come on. Don't do cold email." Kathleen: Right. You're in violation of the universal rules of marketing. Nikki: Yes. So, when I see these kinds of comments, I totally get where they come from, but I think it's just an interesting... See, cold email is a valid technique, and especially when companies are small, and they're trying to grow. Inbound marketing, for sure, do it, absolutely. Content marketing, it's great, all of these techniques. Really, it should be everything. You should have your team doing all these different techniques, and if you're trying to grow fast, then cold email could be really effective, and it doesn't have to be in violation with all the things that we associate with good marketing, being authentic, being wanted, being helpful. All these different things could come in cold email. We're a little bit biased towards cold email in thinking that it is evil and annoying because we get really bad cold emails. Most people do not get cold emails. When I give presentations on cold emails, I'll put in a few examples of cold emails that I get, and I never get good ones. So, it's always these really bad examples in there. So, we're definitely skewed towards thinking that cold email can't be effective, won't be effective, is annoying, and we don't want to do that to our audience. But there definitely is a right way to do it, and it's a great technique to use if you're doing it right. When should you use cold email? Kathleen: So, you mentioned there's a place for everything. Right? It's almost like when they say about diets, everything in moderation. So, when is the right time to use cold email? Nikki: Good question. I think two times would be great. Number one is just if a company is small or they're having trouble growing or they're having trouble acquiring customers, it's just a good time to try it, test it out, see how it works. The next is, I would say, if you're working on relationship building. So, it's less about acquiring customers and more about acquiring leverage and influence and authority, if you're trying to get your content out to more people, not with those templated, "Hey, I wrote a post that's like your post," but really authentically trying to build a relationship with someone. That's another aspect where it could work really well. GDPR and cold email Kathleen: Interesting. Before we dig into that a little bit deeper, I'm curious... Geographically, obviously the European Union has a lot of rules that are different than other places, although in the US California is doing things that are starting to look a lot more like GDPR. Are there things that marketers should be aware of when it comes to cold email and geographic use of it? Nikki: Definitely talk to your legal team, see how these laws do affect things. They are kind of vague a little bit, so you can probably usually get away with sending one email. An entire sequence, you might want to check with your legal team, see how it goes, and then the US market is a nice big market, so definitely, you could reach out there and see how things go too. How to get started with cold email (the right way) Kathleen: Yeah, that's good advice. All right. So, if I'm a marketer and I fit one of those categories you talked about, and I actually do, I just started a new job at Prevailion, so I'll use myself as an example. We're an early-stage company. We just got our Series A round. We're just really bringing the product to market, and we don't have a huge database. I feel like we're exactly what you described. You need to build your network, get in front of more potential customers. How should I really start to think about cold email outreach so that I'm doing it right? Nikki: I would say that, number one, you want to define what it is that you are offering. They say any piece of marketing is made up of list, offer, and creative. In this case, it's usually just copy. So, you first want to hone down exactly what you can offer, and then you want to move on to your list, which is finding the prospects that need what it is that you offer. Then once you have that, then you could start writing the copy, and copy always first comes with research, so really digging into who those people are and why they need what you offer, and framing in a friendly, authentic, honest, open way of, "Yes, I'm pitching you, but I want to not be annoying, and I'm being transparent about this, and I really just want to help you." If you come from a place of, "I have a great product," and you are a great person, and you're respectful of both those things, then your cold email is not annoying. I think this is something that... I get this a lot, where people are always asking, "Well, how do you be creative, and how do you make an engaging subject line?" and all these different things on creativity. I think much, much, much more important than creativity is making sure that you have something that the person is interested in and needs, and framing it that way, and just being respectful of their inbox, of their time, and who they are as a person, and their role. Those things are much more important. Yes, you need to get people's attention, but writing a subject line that's like, "Help. I'm in jail," and then your body is, "Hi, I got your attention. Ha-ha. Now read my email," that's not going to... You got the open. You got the open. Great job. Kathleen: And then you just made them mad. Nikki: Exactly, or some people like it. I've heard feedback where people are like, "Oh, that's so cool. You're so creative," but just because you're creative doesn't mean that I now want to use your service. So, you got the open, but you don't necessarily get the response or the click, in whichever case it is with cold email. So, definitely, you want to start thinking about who they are, what you offer, and how you can tie it together and present it in a way that's really a no-brainer of, "This is the perfect fit for you, and you should do this, and it will be awesome." Kathleen: So, I'm going to totally put you on the spot. Nikki: Okay. Kathleen: I feel like that is so much more easily said than done, because as we've discussed, 99% of the emails that we get that are cold are terrible, so people are clearly failing across the board to do this well. I mean, do you have any tips or examples of wording? How do you walk that line of creating that feeling of genuineness and conveying that you respect their inbox while also acknowledging that you are sending them an unsolicited email and pitching them, essentially? Nikki: Yeah, definitely. I think just being really transparent and believing in your product, believing that you have something of value, and knowing deeply that they need it, not in a way where you're like, "Hey, you are terrible because X, Y, Z." That's another thing that people will do in cold emails, is they'll start critiquing and giving advice, and nobody really wants advice or to be insulted without being insulted. Even if you frame it really nicely, it's not a great way to start a relationship. So, just being very... I know this isn't helpful because it's kind of vague, but see, the really cool thing about cold email is there's this principle in email copywriting, which is called the Rule of One, that you want to pretend you're writing to one person, so being very human, and writing the way that you talk, and things like that. The cool thing is that with cold email, you are writing to one person. So, really just writing your email as if you're writing it to a friend, being really just honest and transparent. I mean, this is where it comes in, the whole believing in your product, and just framing it in a way of, "I really believe this will help you." Obviously, you could use formulas and email formulas that help you do this, like PAS, pain, agitation, solution, but just kind of write a letter as if you're writing it to a friend. Pretend your friend needs your product, and write this letter, and then kind of chop it down into an email. That can definitely help you with being friendly and personable and authentic and honest. Kathleen: Yeah. The Rule of One thing is super helpful. I use that a lot, more even... I definitely use it for email body copy, but I really use it for subject lines because I find that marketers tend to write very terrible subject lines in the sense that they're very stilted and corporate-sounding. It's like we all went to the same school of what a subject line should sound like, and made their subject lines sound totally robotic. So, I started doing that just intuitively a couple years ago. I have this friend Jen, and I always pretend I'm writing an email to Jen, and I'm like, what would I put in the subject line if this was Jen that I was sending it to? It wouldn't be like, brackets, webinar, blah, blah, blah. It would be, "Can I ask you a question?" or, "I thought this might interest you," and even down to punctuation, not using title case for every word. You don't do that when you're writing to friends. So, I don't know. I just think that's a really interesting trick to run through, and I think for every person, it's going to be different, who they picture in their head, but the more you can make it like a real, real person that you actually know, the more that mnemonic becomes really helpful. Nikki: Yeah, totally. I think it's... There's a lot of flack about customer personas and how they're not really authentic and all this, or maybe they are really important and all this. It's definitely very helpful when you're writing email to have a person, because yeah, then you picture them as a person that you're writing to, versus other aspects of marketing, the persona idea gets more fuzzy because it's not a one-to-one conversation. So, definitely with email persona, it helps tremendously. What we're saying with subject lines is... I've been having a lot of fun testing different types of subject lines, like just a subject line full of emojis, and that's it, just emojis. I mean, I personally will always uppercase my email when I write to friends, not title case on every line, but the first word is always upper- Kathleen: No, that's what I meant though. Yes, the first letter of the line, like a sentence would be- Nikki: But it is interesting- Kathleen: ... not every... Sorry. Go ahead. Nikki: Right, every word. Kathleen: Yeah. Nikki: But it is interesting to test what happens when you don't capitalize anything, because there are people that will write emails like that. So, just because I won't doesn't mean that my target audience doesn't receive emails like that more often. So, it's definitely been a lot of fun testing all different sorts of subject lines and things like that. That's another thing with cold email, is that it should not just be a one and done, this is the template that we sent to everybody, this is the email that we sent to everyone. You should be testing and iterating and seeing what gets opened, what gets responses, all this kind of stuff, because there are all those elements. You need the open. You need the response. You need the interest. Maybe they are interested in your product, but you're asking them to get on a call for 15 minutes, and they don't have 15 minutes. There's so many things that play into the success of your email, so definitely test, test, test, test, test, test, test. How long should your emails be? Kathleen: So, I have a question that I actually really want to ask you about this, because you mentioned that you do work for Copyhackers, and I have attended tons of Copyhackers Tutorial Tuesdays. I've gotten lots of the templates. So, I follow what you guys are doing, and one of the things that I think is really interesting, and I've always wondered about, so maybe you can finally clear up the mystery, is what I always hear from marketers that I follow is brevity is so key. People have such short attention spans. They want you to get right to the point. But I've noticed with several of the best email copywriters I follow, you, Joanna Wiebe, Val Geisler does it, the emails that I'm seeing are longer. There's more of almost a story to them, and I'm just wondering if you could comment on that. What is the relationship between brevity and effectiveness in email? Nikki: Definitely. I would say that for sure with cold email, you do want to try for brevity. Not necessarily. My most successful cold email was not short at all. But because you are new to the person, you do want to kind of just try to be short and to the point. Now, where storytelling comes in and all these ideas of really engaging the person, you have to, number one, know your audience, and number two, test, but a cool trick is stages of awareness, which basically, if you're... So, this is actually the opportunity of what I'm saying, that your first instance of cold emails should be short, but if the person doesn't know you and doesn't know your product, and doesn't even know, necessarily, that they need your product, you need more time to walk them through to get to that point of being able to say yes to you. So, it makes more sense to have a longer email because you need to walk them through all these objections and education and all this stuff to get them to this point where they can commit. So, I guess the reason why I say that your cold emails should be short is just because many people struggle with the storytelling, so I don't want that to get in the way. I want you to just be able to focus on your offer and how you can help people, and you don't need length if you can really say that very clearly and compellingly. If you feel like you do need length, I guess because I've seen a lot of cold... From students that I've mentored, I've seen cold emails that are long because they feel like they have to explain and talk about themselves and give social proof and benefits and bullet points. That kind of long email, yes, you're walking them through and kind of trying to hit objections, but it's very dry. It's not engaging. So, it's just kind of hard to find the fine line between long and engaging and not boring the person long, that kind of long. So, I guess if you are an email copywriter or a copywriter, or you're a great writer and you studied copy, then go for long. Don't be scared of... You must be brief. That's the most important thing in marketing. But if you just want to get your product out there, and you're kind of scared of this whole storytelling thing, then I wouldn't... With cold email, it's really just about doing it. The more you do it, the more responses you'll get. So, I don't want long to scare you. But if you do have a great story, and it's engaging, then don't be scared of needing to be short either. Did that make sense? Kathleen: Yeah. No, that does make sense, because like I said, I've definitely noticed that there are times when really good emails are longer, and it's just interesting to me to understand when you would use one or the other. But I agree with you because I think what I'm hearing you say is a lot of people use length as a crutch because they're not able to concisely say what they should be able to concisely say, as opposed to using length to really build a narrative and a story. Nikki: Exactly. Yes. You summed that up beautifully. Determining the audience size for your cold email outreach campaign Kathleen: Thank you. So, I want to go back. You mentioned that with any email there is the list, the offer, and the creative, and I want to go back to the list for a second, because you said something earlier that I picked up on, which is that you want to think like you're writing an email to one person, but then you said you really are writing it to one person. So, to clarify, when you talk about cold email, are you talking about one-to-one cold email, or are you talking about one-to-many cold email, or both? Nikki: So, it depends. I've written cold email for sales teams to send to other teams, and they do address it to one person, but they're sending it... It is a sort of template that they send out to a whole bunch of different companies, whole bunch of different teams. So, it definitely could be both. I guess in that instance I was referring to when you're trying to build a relationship, and you are sending it to one person. But even still, you're sending it to a smaller list than you usually do- Kathleen: So, that was going to be my question, just to make sure, was if you're going to do a list, do you have any rules around what size, how big is too big, how should you do segments and subsegments? Can you talk about that a little bit? Nikki: Yeah, definitely. I think it depends what your goals are, obviously, like everything else, but they usually have something in common together, all the people that you're trying to reach. So, for example, I did a cold outreach for Sprout Social, and it was for a retail push, a push for retail e-commerce brands trying to streamline their social media management. So, they broke it down into different company sizes, not quite company sizes, but more the company size according to their goals with social. So, that was one segment, was... One segment was retail, and one segment was what their goals were with social, on retail social. So, that was two segments. Then did we segment it even further? Then part of the template that I wrote for the sales reps was also personalizing it towards what their social use was. So, I wrote a few A/B emails based on how they were using social. So, there was kind of like those three elements of segmentation, their industry, their size and goals, and then how they actually would use the tool. Does that answer your question as more- Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. No, it does. I mean, it sounds like you want your audience to be homogeneous, at least when it comes to the dimensions that you're focusing most closely on, whether that's everyone has this job title, and I'm targeting them for that reason, or everyone has this pain point, and I'm targeting for that reason. That level of homogeneity is important so that you're going to be able to speak to them, and it will resonate. Nikki: Especially because their pricing plans correlate with what their goals are and what types of roles the people at the company are taking. So, it's hard to talk about the features and benefits that you're going to have if you're just talking to everyone who will be using different features and benefits, and what their pain points are, exactly, all that kind of stuff. It's important to be able to write your email to be able to segment them according to what is important to them. KPIs for cold email outreach Kathleen: So, from a list standpoint, if you're doing cold email, by nature, people haven't heard from you before, and you're sending it to a list, not a one-to-one. Are there any standard metrics that you use to judge, hey, our subscribe rate shouldn't be above X, and our spam complaint rate shouldn't be above X? Nikki: We don't have standards. I think it depends on your industry and what your standards are. You always want your conversion rates to be higher than they already are, and your unsubscribe rates to be lower, but definitely, if you're going to be sending a sequence, putting in a little unsubscribe button is very helpful, especially with GDPR and all this kind of thing, to just let people know, "Hey, I think this is something that's interesting for you, but if you don't want to hear from me again, that's totally fine. That's okay. We'll move on to someone else." That also helps psychologically because people don't like to miss out on things, and if they buy into it, then they really buy into it. So, you can't lose if you allow people an exit. What types of offers work best with cold email outreach? Kathleen: Yeah. That makes sense. So, it was list, offer, creative. When it comes to offer, cold outreach, are there certain types of offers that work really well versus others? Nikki: Definitely. You want to be convenient for people. So, if you're asking them to get on a call with you, don't tell them, "Hey, book a free demo with me for 30 minutes." Even though that is what your sales team will normally do, you'll have your team book demos for 30 minutes, you want to get them to micro commit before that bigger step. So, just like, "Hey, can we get on a clarification call for five minutes?" before you even mention the word demo and 30 minutes. Don't scare people off with that. So, definitely, whatever your offer is, it should be something that is very easy for them to commit to. You can sweeten the pot and offer incentives, just whatever it takes to make it a really, really compelling offer. So, think how you're solving their pain. That's your actual offer, and then surround your offer with things that make it easy for them to say yes to. Kathleen: So, would you say that the biggest mistake that people make when it comes to the offer aspect of this is that they ask too much? In other words, they go too far bottom of the funnel with the offer that they're making? Nikki: Absolutely, for sure. I would also say that they... or they do both. They either do making this huge ask, not huge, but a big ask for a cold email, or they kind of leave it very vague and very the ball in your court, so like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" or, "Let me know what you think," or these very vague, not committing... It's very easy to say no to something like that, and you don't even have to say no. You don't say yes, which essentially is a no. So, I've seen emails that do both of that, like, "What do you think about a 15-minute call?" No, I think a 15-minute call is a bad idea. Kathleen: Right, right. Nikki: So, definitely, you want to really offer something, and not just like, "Can we catch 15 minutes?" but, "How's 15 at this time?" being really specific and assertive, and also offering something that's very easy to say yes to. How does including a video impact the effectiveness of cold email? Kathleen: Yeah. Now, have you ever studied or tested in the cold emails you've done how including a video from the sender affects results? So, in the last two years, the team that I was working with at IMPACT, we did a ton of testing of including a video or a GoVideo of the sender actually putting in, "Hey, this is Kathleen. Just wanted to put a face with the name and tell you I'm hoping to connect with you," whatever you're saying, but having that in there. I'm curious to know if you've tried that out at all. Nikki: Yes, definitely. That Sprout sequence that I just mentioned had a Vidyard, actually, not just a video, but Vidyard video. Kathleen: I love Vidyard. Nikki: They are pretty awesome. So, we haven't got the results back on that yet, but how did it go at your previous job? Kathleen: We saw it made a huge difference, in general. We did it with a lot of emails, and what we found was that... Well, it was a combination of two things, including a video, and then stripping formatting out of the email and making it look as much like a regular Gmail as possible. Those two things when put together blew my mind. So, I was a leader of a HubSpot user group, and I used to send the templated emails that were just formatted and regular copy about new meetups, and to encourage people to register. People would register. I would never get any emails back, but then when we switched to stripped-down format and video from me saying, "I hope you'll be there," it was so interesting. All of a sudden, I started getting personal replies like, "Oh, I can't make it this time. I'm so sorry." People were really responding to me as opposed to, oh, here's a hug email. I'm going to register. Then it was funny because HubSpot changed the way you had to market those, and I had to go back to a templated email, and I never get replies anymore, and I can't put video in. So, there you have it. I don't know whether it was the stripped-down formatting or the video, but it was dramatic, the difference that it made. Nikki: Yeah. It's fascinating to me that video in email has not advanced more than it has, because it really does increase conversions amazingly, because all of a sudden it's a real person instead of just a nice, pretty template or a block of text. Obviously, there are companies that are making a difference like Vidyard, but why is it not a standard feature in Gmail to just- Kathleen: Oh, I know, especially if you're able to put the person's name on the whiteboard and have an animated gif with you smiling. It's hard to resist that when I think you're the recipient, but- Nikki: They also know that you're invested in them and invested in general in your offer when you go lengths to personalize and to be human. What kinds of results can you expect with cold email outreach? Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm curious. You've done this work with different clients. What kind of results have you seen from cold outreach? I would love it if you could share some of your success stories, and what kind of response rate did they get? Nikki: So, my biggest success story is actually how I started working with Copyhackers. I sent one email to Joanna Wiebe, which obviously was not a list. It wasn't any... It was just me to her, and it was one email. I landed an $11,500 project from that, and then a few months later I sent her another email that was more of like a joke kind of email, totally unrelated. It was like a personal email almost, and she's like, "Okay. That's it. You're going to be my new email copywriter." Kathleen: That's great. Nikki: So, that was a pretty cool win. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, if you're going to get hired by Copyhackers to be the email person, you better be writing some great emails to Joanna. Nikki: Yes. So, that was really fun, and- Kathleen: I love it. What about at scale? Have you had any interesting successes with one-to-many emails? Nikki: So, Sprout Social, we didn't get the results back yet. There was another campaign that I wrote recently. Let me think for a second. Kathleen: I know. I'm springing this on you last minute, which is totally not fair. Nikki: I'm trying to think. Who was it for? Oh, LoyalSnap, which I don't think I saw the results for that either, unfortunately. I don't think- Kathleen: Well, we're going to have to do a part two then at some point. Nikki: Yeah. Kathleen: We'll do a Nikki Elbaz interview, the sequel, and get the results. Nikki: Cool. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah. So, we're coming up to the top of our time. I want to make sure I have a chance to ask you the two questions I always ask everybody, which the first one is, company or individual, is there somebody you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Nikki: Hands down, Drift, because they were built first as inbound. That's all they did, and then they created their product to satisfy their audience's need. You can't get more awesome than that. They have so much fun delighting their users and their employees. It's this whole experience of buying into their culture and getting free gifts from them, from a bot. They're just so fun, and they're very authentic, really thought-provoking thought leadership from their employees, so it's also great that they give a platform to their employees. They're doing so many good things, so many things right. So, definitely follow them if you're not following them already. Kathleen: Yeah. It was funny when you were talking about email subject lines, and you said some companies send the all lowercase subject lines and the emoji subject lines. I almost interrupted you to say, "That's Drift," because that's how I first started noticing the all lowercase subjects lines. They had sent one, and I was like, "Hmm, that's interesting. They're testing putting no capitals in their subject lines. I might need to test that." Yeah. It's good to not only follow them, but really look at their marketing and see what they're doing, because they try things a lot of other people are afraid to try. Nikki: Yeah, they're ahead of the game in that aspect. Kathleen: My other question that I always ask people is... Digital marketing just changes so quickly, and it can be really hard to keep up. How do you personally stay up-to-date? Nikki: So, obviously there's a bunch of places that I'll read their blogs and things like that, like Drift and Copyhackers, obviously. My new favorite is The Product-Led Growth Collective. They're pretty new, so bare bones content, but really high-level, great stuff on product-led growth, obviously. But I think the best, best place that I keep up learning is just Slack groups, social media, from other people that are in the trenches, doing things that I'm not doing, doing things that I am doing, and asking questions that I haven't thought of, or just really being in it with other people. I just love being a part of those conversations. They're pointing you to great content. They're asking questions that lead to amazing discussions. It's just a great way to open your horizon and learn more. Kathleen: Any particular groups that you're really fond of? What are your top three? Nikki: So, Demand Curve is my number one. Then there's also Online Geniuses, and I guess I would say... This isn't applicable for most people, but The 10X Freelance Copywriter by Copyhackers is a really awesome community, and I have a lot of fun in there. So, that's my number three. Kathleen: Great. Yeah, those were all good ones. I'll have to... I'm already in Online Geniuses, but I haven't checked out the other two, so I will have to do that. Nikki: Cool. I wouldn't underestimate also just Twitter and LinkedIn in general. Just finding the people that you like to follow and reading the discussions there, for sure, is pretty awesome too. How to connect with Nikki Kathleen: Amen. I totally agree with that. If somebody wants to reach out, ask you a question, learn more, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? Nikki: Join my email list. Then I can email you. Kathleen: And then you can see Nikki's amazing emails. Nikki: Exactly. So, you could sign up at nikkielbaz.com, and that's how you get on my email list, and then you have my email, and you can even email me too. Kathleen: All right. I'll put the link to that in the show notes, so head to nikkielbaz.com and join the list. Thank you so much for coming on. This was really interesting, and I love digging into cold email. Such a controversial topic. I feel like we should be really subversive and start to post more about it in our group so that we can share your opinion. Nikki: All right. You know what to do next... Kathleen: But no, thanks for coming on. If you are listening, and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, please leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find us, and if you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Nikki. Nikki: Thanks for having me.  

Animalz is quickly gaining a reputation for being one of the top content marketing shops in the B2B SaaS world. Here's how they approach content creation... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Animalz marketing director Jimmy Daly dives into his process for creating content for Animalz. As the guy in charge of both marketing AND sales for Animalz, he splits his time between marketing/lead generation and closing deals. When he's on sales calls, Jimmy pays close attention to the questions he gets from prospects and turns each of those questions into an article on the Animalz blog. This process has netted strong sales results that the company can track directly back to the individual articles Jimmy creates. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."   Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Jimmy include: Jimmy is responsible for marketing and sales at Animalz, which is a B2B content marketing agency. Because Jimmy is involved in both sales and marketing, he is constantly listening on sales calls for the questions prospects are asking and turning them into articles on the Animalz blog. Jimmy thinks that a lot of marketers do buyer personas wrong and focus too much on creating fictional characters. In his case, he thinks of his audience on a spectrum from tactical to strategic. If he's writing to a tactical audience, that person needs instructions on how to do something. If he's writing to a strategic audience, they need a framework for how to make a big decision.  By focusing on creating content about the questions he gets in the sales process, Jimmy can in some cases attribute three or four deals worth $50,000 to $75,000 to an individual blog article. When new articles are published, Animalz emails them out to its newsletter distribution list, but Jimmy is also a fan of using Tweet storms to gain traction and visibility online. Another form of content that Animalz has seen get strong results for its clients is thought leadership articles. They define thought leadership as essays that express a strong, original point of view. The average new article on the Animalz website gets 3,000 to 5,000 views in the first two months after publication.  Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Connect with Jimmy on LinkedIn Follow Jimmy on Twitter Check out the Animalz website Listen to the podcast to learn more about how Jimmy leverages the conversations he's having with sales prospects to build a more effective marketing strategy for Animalz. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. And today my guest is Jimmy Daley, who's the marketing director at Animalz. Welcome, Jimmy. Jimmy Daly (Guest): Thanks so much, Kathleen. I'm happy to be here. Jimmy and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here because your agency has come up twice on this podcast before. As my loyal listeners know, I always ask my guests who is doing inbound marketing really well, company or individual, and two times now I've had one of my guests say Animalz. I think most recently it was Barron Caster at rev.com. So whenever I hear that sort of pattern happen, I think I need to talk to that person. Jimmy: That's awesome. That makes my day. Kathleen: Yeah, so I'm glad you're here. And for the listeners, can you just talk a little bit about who you are, your background, as well as what Animalz does? About Jimmy Daly and Animalz Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a longtime B2B content marketer. I've been working in some capacity in content marketing for almost 10 years. I started as a writer, evolved to kind of managing freelancers and other writers, and now as a marketing director at Animalz, I'm responsible for new business. So I'm in charge of marketing the company and then also doing our sales, which has been a very interesting evolution, as I think we'll probably get into a little bit. Jimmy: Animalz is a content marketing agency. Primarily, we work with B2B SaaS companies. We've been around for about four years. We're a distributed team, a fantastic team too, we have some really great people. We work with awesome customers. I feel we've built a model that allows us to hire great people, pay them good salaries, that allows us to create really, really high quality work, which helps us attract fantastic clients. So it's a great system and a really fun place to work. Kathleen: That's great, and obviously, it's contributing to you guys producing great work, because the word on the street is that you're a good agency to work with. Aligning Sales and Marketing Kathleen: One of the things I was fascinated by when you and I first connected is how you talked about, I asked you what was really moving the needle and you talked about some of the ways that you're kind of aligning sales and marketing. Because you kind of are like a one-man sales and marketing team, correct? Jimmy: That is correct, yes. Kathleen: Yeah, and it's funny we talked about- Jimmy: To caveat by saying... Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. It feels unfair to take too much credit for all the amazing business that we get because so much of it is driven by word of mouth. I feel fortunate that in my first role doing sales that we have very low volume requirements, right? We're not like a SaaS company that needs hundreds or thousands of new customers a month. We only need two or three or four for a really fantastic month. Kathleen: Yeah, but it's interesting to me because I think there's a lot of conversations that happen amongst people that work at really large companies about what is the best way to achieve sales and marketing alignment. I think that sometimes the fact that there are just a lot of people involved kind of serves as a barrier to seeing what could be a much simpler and more elegant solution. I liked when you talked about how you address this issue that you could be a larger team doing what you're doing, you just happen to be one guy. It shows how when you're one person and you have to do it all, how you align with yourself. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Jimmy: Yeah, definitely. Well, certainly, it's easier with just one person, right? I'm a writer at heart and so I'm constantly looking for ideas to spark what will be the next blog post for the Animalz blog. Luckily, I get so much of that through our sales process, right? So I spend a lot of time on the phone, meeting potential customers, trying to close deals, onboarding new customers, and that provides me with a lot of fodder for blog posts. Jimmy: We have a very, very lean process where basically I am just constantly observing the things that I'm hearing in those sales calls, and then documenting them on the blog in one form or another. So if I hear two or three different people on a sales call mention a similar thing, then that gets jotted down. That goes in the editorial calendar. There's probably two dozen of those in the editorial calendar right now that have not even been written yet. Actually, one thing I've learned very related to this is that most B2B SaaS companies have very, very similar problems. Because we're so specialized in that niche, it allows us to by speaking to one company, we can speak to almost all of them. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point, and it really hits home, because one of the owners of IMPACT is a man named Marcus Sheridan, who has literally written a book called, They Ask You Answer. He wasn't a marketer by trade, he was a pool guy. He had a pool company, and he just started listening to the questions he was getting from customers because he was out on sales calls all the time, and then answering them. The answers that he wrote in the form of blog posts generated a tremendous amount of traffic, leads, and then eventually sales for the company. Now of course he's a marketing speaker and an author. But what I love about that approach and what I so appreciate is it's so elegant in its simplicity. I often say, at least in the case of Marcus, it took a non-marketer to figure out that that was a thing. Jimmy: Yeah, that's so interesting. Kathleen: It's common sense, right? It's solving for the people. If one person has a question, odds are there's like hundreds, if not thousands of them, out there with the same question. They just haven't happened to reach out to you directly to ask it yet. Jimmy: Absolutely. Now that I've had this experience of experiencing the full circle of someone finding a blog post, reaching out, talking through problems, realizing there's another blog post to be written that sparked someone else to reach out, et cetera, et cetera, I, thinking back on previous jobs, realized that I hadn't spent hardly any time talking to customers. I was just so focused on optimizing a piece of content for search or doing keyword research or trying to build links to a piece of content that I overlooked this very, very obvious fact that you have to actually talk to the people that you're trying to reach so that you can have a very nuanced understanding of their problems. Do You Really Need Buyer Personas? Kathleen: Yeah, and it's funny that you say this because I also have had long conversations with Marcus about the concept of buyer personas, because he actually says you don't need buyer personas in marketing, which is somewhat controversial because I feel like go to any marketing conference, read any marketing book, talk to any marketing expert, and then I'll be like start with buyer personas, right? Jimmy: Right, right. Kathleen: His point is, it's kind of related to what you're saying, which is that instead of spending a month doing all this research and interviews and this and that, and then creating this like fictional profile, if you spend that same month and just sit down and catalog 50 questions and write 50 answers out in the form of blogs, you'll be so much further ahead than you would have been had you done a month's worth of audience persona research, which I think is true. Jimmy: Fascinating. Kathleen: That's sort of what you're saying. Like, no staged interview can substitute for an actual live sales conversation. Jimmy: No, it's so true, and I would agree with Marcus that I'm personally not a huge believer in buyer personas. I'm sure in some cases they're executed in a way that's really useful. Typically, the way that we see them executed is like, Software Sally is a mid-career manager and she has this problem. It's so fictional that it's hard to take this fake demographic and turn it into a marketing campaign. Jimmy: We actually think about that in a very different way, which is so like when I'm writing a post for the Animalz blog, I'm thinking of the reader on a spectrum from tactical to strategic. If we're writing to a tactical audience, that person needs instructions on how to do something. If we're writing to a strategic audience, they need a framework for how to make a big decision. And a lot of little steps is actually not very helpful. They need more of an overarching principle. There's kind of a mix of those different things, but I found that to be a much more effective way to think through, okay, we have this topic, there's this tactical way we could go about it, but if we want to reach this more decision maker level person, we have to kind of take a step back and try to understand the higher level problem and address it from that angle instead. Kathleen: No, I always say we get caught up in this term buyer persona, and as you say, people tend to create these somewhat useless but entertaining profiles of people who don't exist. What we really need is buyer persona, it's good audience research, which essentially is what you're doing when you have these conversations with people and catalog what they're saying. Jimmy's Process For Capturing Content Ideas Kathleen: So let's talk through an actual example. You're having these sales calls, you're getting these questions. Walk me through your process. Is it simply you just make a note and you say, "Oh, I better go write a blog on this?" Or do you have a structured process around it? Jimmy: I wish I could say I had a very structured process. I don't though. I think over years of doing content marketing, I'm tuned in, right? I'm observing very carefully what people are saying, how they're saying it. Are they frustrated? Are they excited? I sort of pull those threads as I uncover that we're onto something. Jimmy: A very good example of this happened, I don't know, probably almost a year ago now, where I got on three sales calls in a week and three different people told me they had this exact same problem, which was that their organic traffic was actually declining over the last three months or so. I thought that was very interesting, and in each case it had prompted them to do some research about why their traffic was declining, reach out to some friends to try to help them figure out what was going on, and then that prompted them to reach out to an agency to potentially help them. Jimmy: To me, that was like the most obvious example because it happened in such a short period of time. But we wrote a blog post about that, about why organic traffic declines and things you might do to reverse that trend. That post has been hugely successful for us. It turns out a lot of people have that problem. Just through our very, very lean process, we made sure that it was documented, published, distributed, and I could attribute probably three to four more deals that were closed, at least in part, as a result of that exact article, and those deals are good for, $50,000 to $75,000 a year each. Kathleen: Wow. Jimmy: So, it's a easy, simple process with a big payoff. Kathleen: I love hearing that kind of data because you always have people who say, "I don't have time to blog," but I don't know anybody who's billable rate is as high as $50,000 an hour, or let's say it took you four hours, $10,000 an hour. Even some of the best attorneys I know don't charge that much. So, there's a good case there for spending the time. Jimmy: Absolutely. Animalz Content Promotion Strategy Kathleen: Now you've mentioned you write it, you edit it, you optimize it, and then you distribute it. Can you just talk through a little bit, I mean, is this a case of you write these blogs, you put them on your site, and it's, if you build it, they will come? Or is your content distribution or promotion strategy somewhat responsible for the results you're getting? Jimmy: That's a good question. So a few things happen. I should again caveat this by saying, as an agency, we have very low volume requirements. Our blog frankly doesn't get all that much traffic, doesn't need a ton of traffic in order to really help the business. Two to three new deals in a month is a fantastic month. So I actually don't go crazy distributing content. Jimmy: We have an email list with a few thousand people on it. They get everything. I have a personal email newsletter with about 5,000 people on it. I include our stuff in that. We have a really strong network of customers that we will sometimes ask to help us amplify content. Then other than that, I'm a fan of tweet storms. Whenever I publish something new, tweet storms have been a really useful way for us to get stuff out. Then I ask our team to help re-tweeting or sharing stuff. So again, it's simple. The reach is not enormous, by any means, but it's big enough that it works. Kathleen: That's great. Have you done this with clients or have you advised clients on doing this and have they seen similar results? Jimmy: Hmm, that's a great question. In a few cases, yes. In some cases, it just doesn't quite work. So like for example, many of our customers are B2B SaaS. Their primary objective is growing organic search traffic. So we're doing the things you would probably expect. We do a lot of keyword research, we write really long informative posts, we optimize them for search, et cetera, et cetera. That provides a certain amount of leverage in their distribution, because over time they can get a lot more traffic out of organic search than we'll ever be able to get for them doing one-off promotional things. Jimmy: For some of our other customers though, there's this bucket of customers that we work with, and we produce thought leadership content for them. That type of content also works very well using the same very simple mechanisms that we use for our own content, because it's more about making an impact, sharing an idea, and less about the more traditional content distribution where it's about basically page views. Kathleen: Now can you define what you mean by thought leadership content? Because I know people use that term in different ways. Jimmy: It's funny you ask that. I have a half-written blog posts about this exact topic, because you're right, people do think of it in very different ways. The way that it typically manifested Animalz, a thought leadership content strategy is built around sort of this idea that we internally call movement first, where the emphasis is really on sharing strong original ideas and that is like the core of the strategy for that type of content. It often looks more like an essay than it does regular content marketing. It often lives on Medium or a different part of the site than the rest of your blog content. Those things don't all have to be true. Jimmy: We do have a couple of cases with customers where we're doing SEO-driven content with thought leadership characteristics. Simply meaning that we've started with a keyword, but then we've taken a very different approach to the style and the tone of that article. I guess ultimately it means different things. To me the thing that it really means is this piece of content is born from a great idea and it is hopefully encapsulated in that article in a very concise way. Kathleen: That's interesting, and I love that you mentioned not all of this content lives on your site. You mentioned Medium, which I'm always curious about Medium. I think it has so much potential, but you can also, if you don't do it right, spend a lot of time with no results. Jimmy: No, totally. I'm actually personally not a huge fan for the problem that you just stated. We have encouraged a couple customers recently to launch personal blogs that are affiliated with the company that they work for, which is a strategy that I'm liking so far. Obviously, there are institutional hurdles to jump over when you do that kind of thing. Kathleen: Right. Jimmy: But owning the platform provides a bunch of advantages that tend to make it worth it. How To Approach Bottom of the Funnel Content Kathleen: Yeah. Going back to this notion of sales and marketing alignment, at a very, very simplistic level, what you're talking about is being very mindful of the questions you're getting in the sales process, and then answering those questions in your articles. I feel like this has the potential to be incredibly powerful, but it also has the potential to be insanely misused by content creators who venture into the territory of being overly self-promotional. In other words, using a sales question as an excuse to write a blog that is all about the company and their products as opposed to bigger picture questions that a prospect has. Can you talk me through, like do you have any personal guardrails around how you handle that type of content, what topics you'll cover, what you won't, and how often you venture into that very, very bottom of the funnel kind of topic area? Jimmy: Wow, that's a really interesting question. I don't know that I have come across a situation yet where the only answer to the question is you should hire Animalz. I mean, certainly I drop mentions in there occasionally, but just as a company we think about this so differently. Jimmy: I'll give you an example. You know our core business is content marketing services. Through this process of closely observing the problems that come up on sales calls and then also the problems that come up with customers, because there's plenty of those too, we're in the very early stages of building out some software solutions to address those problems. I anticipate that in the future, this problem that you bring up will become more top of mind because we're going to have more things to promote, right? There's just so few companies that are interested, willing, and ready to hire an expensive content marketing agency, that hopefully there will be many, many more that would be interested in paying $10 or $50 or $100 a month to use a piece of software that would solve some of these same things. So yeah, that's interesting. I imagine that's something that we'll have to be asking ourselves more closely over the next six to nine months. Kathleen: Yeah, I think a good example is a question that everybody gets at some point in a sales process is how much does it cost, right? That's a very different question than what do I do if my organic traffic is declining? How much does it cost in the wrong hands could be answered in the form of an article. That's basically like a substitute for your pricing page. In the right hands, it's an opening point for discussion around the factors that impact cost. Jimmy: Got it, okay. I think I better understand your question now, so that's a great point. In general, I would like for us to be as transparent as absolutely possible. Interestingly, we find that many of our customers do not have strong Google Analytic skills. So as I write the post about how to diagnose problems with the organic traffic, I just explain exactly the steps I would take in Google Analytics to start doing the research. We're happy to tell you exactly what those steps would be. Then the hope is, and often the reality as well, is that that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's one of so many possible things going on that they ultimately possibly could need help with. It sounds Cliche, but we established that little bit of trust early on, so hopefully they'll think of us when the time actually does come. Kathleen: Yeah, it sounds like your focus is much more on educational topics than it is on, I would call them sort of sales topics, but it's really that bottom of the funnel, those types of questions, which I like. So you're answering questions that are educating the audience and making them smarter, not so much answering questions that help them choose to pull the trigger and purchase from you. Jimmy: That is correct, yes. Kathleen: Yeah, there's an important distinction there. Jimmy: Definitely. The Results Kathleen: Can you tell me a little bit about, do you have any sort of data around like the traction? Do these posts tend to get, percentage-wise, more traffic than some of your other articles? You mentioned that some of them have led to deals. What have the results been from using this approach? Jimmy: That's an interesting question. I can tell you, as I mentioned, none of the posts on our blog are what I call whales. None of them are just like outliers getting tons and tons of traffic. For the most part, they all are, I don't know, they probably 3,000 to 5,000 visits in their first two or three months of publication, which is just okay, but it's not- Kathleen: Which is great, if that's the right 3,000 to 5,000 people, that's all that matters. Jimmy: Totally, yes. Kathleen: You could have 300 to 500 people, and if they were the 300 to 500 people that are looking for an agency, then that's all you would need. Jimmy: Yes, totally. The reason I'm having a little trouble giving you a really specific quantitative answer on how effective they are is because something I've noticed in our sales process is that almost no one reaches out as the result of one interaction or mention of Animalz. It's always two. So they might say, "I heard about you guys at a conference, or a friend mentioned they liked a blog post by you guys, or I'm in this Slack group and someone shared an article that you guys had written." Then sometime later on, they were on Twitter or they were searching for something, and they came across a second piece. It seems to be the power of those two things together that prompts people to reach out, but it's very difficult to track what what those two things are, because usually one of them, or in many cases, one of those things has happened offline and we're not going to be able to get data on it. Kathleen: It's funny that you mentioned that because as I mentioned at the beginning, I reached out to you after hearing your name twice. Jimmy: Yes. Kathleen: I think I'm proof in the pudding. Jimmy: Totally, yes. I think this is probably a little different than the way that most SaaS companies operate. So agencies are able to grow by word of mouth in a way that SaaS companies simply are not. I know I keep throwing out caveats, but we are writing about SaaS content marketing all the time, but we are not a SaaS company. Therefore a lot of it is like do as we say, not necessarily as we do. Kathleen: Interesting. Well, I love that. I love the process. Any other guidelines for somebody listening around how to write those articles or how to make them especially useful? Jimmy: Get feedback on them from people that don't work at the same company that you do. So that's something that I do. I don't do it as often now, but I did it quite a bit when we were initially getting the Animalz blog rolling. I just reached out to friends in the content marketing world and asked them to review drafts of our posts, and I got a lot of really good feedback on that. Kathleen: I love that. That is so simple. It's so simple and something that so few people do. Jimmy: Yes, totally. You can just get better feedback if you don't talk to the person you're asking to review it on a daily basis. I'm part of a couple of Slack groups full of content marketers, a Facebook group full of content marketers. Those have been really amazing resources for getting good feedback on work. I discover things in those feedback sessions that I can't imagine I ever would have figured out any other way. Kathleen: Oh, can you share any of those Slack or Facebook groups, the names of them? Jimmy: Yeah, so there are a couple. So there's a Facebook group I'm in that I believe is just called Content Marketers with an exclamation point. Very good group. I started a Slack group of my own called Content Marketing Career Growth. There is another one I'm in. It is called Content in UX, which is also very good. It's a huge one. There's a ton of people in there, a really, really good community. I'm sure there are others. If you'd like, I can send you links. Kathleen: Yes, please do, and I will include them in the show notes. That would be great. Jimmy: Cool. Kathleen: Yeah, I found similarly some of those groups to be incredibly helpful. I mean, we have our own group which has IMPACT Elite, that's a Facebook group, and then I am a member of Online Geniuses, which is huge. It's all different marketing disciplines. Then I think I might be a member of Content in UX. Sometimes there's so many groups I lose track. Jimmy: Yes, it is easy to lose track. Kathleen: But that's a great tip, to just go outside. If you were talking to a company that had a larger sales and marketing team, any thoughts or advice or insights for bigger company teams on how to operationalize a process like this? Jimmy: Yes, so the first thing, in a perfect world, this would be easy to do, I would have content marketers get on sales calls and I would have sales people write blog posts. Not as a way to test them, but just to have them operate in the other person's world every now and then. I feel like it's trendy, especially for SaaS companies to say every one of the company does customer support twice a year or something like that. I think that if you are going to be doing marketing to support a sales team or you're doing sales that is hopefully the result of high quality marketing, you have to be in the other person's shoes at least every now and then. I would definitely recommend that. Jimmy: Also, there was a thing, I spent a year working at QuickBooks doing content marketing for them, and they had a program set up where once a week they would have a real live QuickBooks customer in the office. They were there for the day and people from around the company could book time with them and ask them questions. So you knew that every Thursday from 9:00 to 4:00 a customer would be there and you could schedule time with them and you could ask them whatever questions you want about how they found QuickBooks, what did they find useful, what do they not, et cetera, et cetera. Jimmy: I think for companies of a certain size, assuming you have enough customers to support a program like that, it's a great idea because we would find that in our weekly content meetings, our team would get together and questions would come up that we just didn't have answers to. Then somebody would say, "Oh, well, why don't we just ask the customer on Thursday?" So we'd book time and we would do that. Kathleen: That is so nice to be able to do that. Jimmy: Yeah, it was fantastic. Maybe it's once a quarter, maybe it's twice a year for smaller companies, but formalizing the process is important. Kathleen: I love that. I wish that I could have a customer in the office every week, but alas, we are not in that position at this point. But no, that is a great point about switching roles and sitting in the other seat, because I do think sometimes there's this very natural tension that builds up between sales and marketing, I think you and I talked about this, I used to be on our sales team. Now I'm on our marketing team and I have much more empathy for our salespeople than I think I would have otherwise. Jimmy: Yes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Yeah, it helps a lot. Well, shifting gears, I'm curious to hear now that I told you several people have mentioned Animalz name when I've asked this question, I'm curious to know who you're going to talk about. So company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Jimmy: Such a good question. So there's a few that come to mind. Am I allowed to offer more than one? Kathleen: Yeah, go for it. Jimmy: I tend to find that companies that do inbound marketing really well build steam and build a strong reputation over time. So I'm a big fan of not just people who are kind of off my radar today, but who have been there for a couple of years and a few that stand out. One company that I think has just done an incredible job over the past five or six years is Wistia. One, because their branding has evolved from, well, it's still friendly and kind of playful, but it's so refined now. It's tangible. The good vibes are tangible when you visit their site. They write really high quality stuff. Their videos are excellent. I mean, I'm not really a video person, but I find myself on their site all the time because I'm just curious what their marketing team is up to, because there's always something new and a little different going on. So that's one that I would call out. Kathleen: That's a good one. Jimmy: You mentioned Barron Caster from Rev at the beginning of this podcast, and it's funny, I was actually just on a call with him this morning. As I've been exposed to what he and the team over there are doing, I am increasingly impressed. One thing that I like about what they do is that their product marketing is straightforward, obvious, but not overly promotional at all. Jimmy: A good example is they have their product marketing team, and they've tied this into their content strategy as well, their product marketing team has come up with solutions for all the possible entry points to a transcription service, and I find that they've just done it in such a perfect little way. So for example, they built iPhone apps for phone call recording, right? That creates this very easy transcription workflow for journalists or anyone who has to do research or interviews for their job. They did the same thing with a voice recording app. They have a Zoom integration. They've just figured out all the little ways that people might work transcription into their day-to-day, and they've addressed that. Jimmy: I find that type of subtle, very useful product marketing to be inspiring, right? Because they're not hammering you with ads and obnoxious copy. They're just kind of offering you a dozen different ways to build their really, really good product into the work you're already doing. So I love that. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree. They do a nice job of really tightly aligning marketing and product. Jimmy: Yes, yes, definitely. Kathleen: Well, a second question, digital marketing is changing so quickly, and the number one gripe I hear from marketers is that they have a really hard time keeping up with everything. So how do you personally keep up and stay up to date and educate yourself? Jimmy: I do most of that offline, to be honest. There's a couple of blogs that I keep track of, like Tomasz Tunguz blog I really like, especially now that I work in sales. He talks about sales quite a bit. He also talks about just the SaaS industry, which I find to be increasingly useful information as I spend less time on the ground doing the marketing and more time talking to customers. So that's one. Jimmy: I'm a very loyal reader of Ben Thompson's Stratechery blog. Similar thing, like his really deep dives on business strategy I find to be useful. I feel like that has provided me with a lot of context for conversations that I have with customers. Jimmy: But like I said, I try to do quite a bit offline too. So one really fantastic resource that I read recently was Jim Collins, Good to Great. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great book. It's such a classic. Jimmy: It's so good. You know, the examples that he uses in there are just timeless. They've stood up so well. Kathleen: Absolutely. Jimmy: So that's one. I have a book on my desk that I keep keep with me all the time, called On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which helps me with the day-to-day writing of blog posts and emails, but also sales proposals now. Whenever I find myself getting stuck on something, I'll open up that book and the answer is always in there. Kathleen: And it's called Unwriting. Jimmy: It's called On Writing Well. Kathleen: Oh, On Writing, got it. Jimmy: Yes. William Zinsser is the author. Kathleen: Great. Oh, lots of new good ones here. I always like when I hear new ones, because this is how I stay up to date is I just ask other people and then follow their lead in my podcast. Jimmy: That's a great idea. How To Connect With Jimmy Kathleen: Well, Jimmy, if somebody wants to learn more about Animalz or wants to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Jimmy: Yeah, animalz.co, we have a kind of outdated, not very fancy website, but hopefully the content there is helpful to you. We also have a podcast and you can find all that stuff on there. Kathleen: Animalz with a z, important to know. Jimmy: Yes, Animalz with a z, and then if you'd like to reach out, please do. Probably the best way to do that is Twitter. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, probably too much, but it's just Jimmy_Daly. Yeah, if you ever want to chat content strategy, hit me up. I love chatting about it. Kathleen: Great, well, thank you so much. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard, you learned something new, I would love it if you would give the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Jimmy. Jimmy: Thank you, Kathleen. That was fun.

David Feinman is the CEO of Viral Ideas Marketing. We met him in his role as one of the Community Managers of Online Geniuses, a huge internet marketing community known for their industry leader AMAs.In this episode David and I compare notes about customer experience and UX as leads become trials and users become evangelists. Marketing, technology, and product SMEs speak different languages, but what we do is all part of the same continuum.Emotionally engaging channels like video drive the first visits and uses. That's where product UX picks up to anchor adoption and retention. A comprehensive view of the customer experience from start to finish is critical for B2C and B2B software companies alike. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we speak with David Markovich, founder and CEO of “Online Geniuses”, one of the largest Slack communities, on the milestones and lessons towards reaching 15,000+ members and how he wants to reach 2 million sent messages.  Podcast Transcription Speaker 1: State of Digital Publishing is creating a new publication, and community for digital publishing and media professionals in new media and technology. In this episode, we speak with David Markovich, founder, and CEO of Online Geniuses. David is a product, and back builder with a marketing background as a direct consultant for some of the largest brands, including Google, Comedy Central, and many more. Let’s begin. Vahe Arabian: Hi, David. How are you? David Markovich: I’m good. Thanks for having me. I’m honored to be on your podcast. Vahe Arabian: I appreciate your time, David. But we spoke in the past and you’ve given me some fantastic insights around building your online community, and it’s great to disseminate this to everyone else. Thanks for joining us. To start off with, can you tell us the basic details, for those who know little about OJ? David Markovich: Yeah, sure. Online Geniuses is essentially the social network for digital marketers. The network is relevant because marketing continuously evolves, with different trends happening, tools, and strategies popping. So, if you wanna stay in the loop, it’s fairly hard to discover where the industry is going, on your own. So, I think with a group of people you’re able to communicate and learn from others, especially in different countries and different cities around the globe. Online Geniuses helps you see what other people are using, and build relationships. It’s a vetted community, which has around 16,000 members that were vetted, manually. The quality of our network is high and the engagement is remarkable. Probably, when this podcast goes live there’ll be two million messages sent within the community. Vahe Arabian: It’s awesome. That’s a good answer. I believe you’re on Slack only. Am I correct? David Markovich: Yeah, we’re based on Slack, but we do a lot of things in person. We organise breakfasts, dinners, drinks, meet-ups, and so on, which help people interact face to face. Vahe Arabian: How important do you think offline communication is to community engagement? David Markovich: So, it’s very important to humanize the community, right? A lot of times when there‘re thousands of people communicating, we kinda forget that these persons have their own lives and stories. I think such issues are bound to happen, but the community gets stronger, when you meet in person, and you’re like, “Oh, you’re the individual behind the user name.” David Markovich: I’ve had friends I met online and we chatted for years, and our relationship become much stronger overnight while hanging out than having dozens of online conversations. Cause you get familiar with the person, and it gives you the chance to pop back in the community and kinda search for that new person. You’re like, “Oh, wow, I bonded with these people.” It encourages folks to set up their own in-person events, using the Online Geniuses community. Vahe Arabian: That’s quite true. There’s always someone who’d have that place in their minds because they’ve met you in person. Being an individual rather than just as a virtual person, I guess. David Markovich: Yeah, and people change. I realized, I’ve hosted some Reddit Events before, and Redditors are quite tough and almost impossible to deal with, in certain cases. And they’re always on the offense. But while hosting Reddit Events years ago, I met them, and I’m like, “Oh, wow, you’re just regular people when you’re not online.” David Markovich: I think people online differ greatly from their real personalities. I also run a community for mental health, and I realized a big problem, especially amongst teens, which is — people think these online folks, who wants to meet them are exactly opposite to how they are in person. David Markovich: So, you see them on Instagram wearing the [Age of Years 00:04:07] and everyone seems to be on the occasions with friends and going to cool places. But when you realize that’s a very tiny part of their life, and a lot of times when they’re in those situations they don’t enjoy it as much as somebody who’s not chasing that online karma or that online perception. It’s very hard to enjoy the moment,  if that’s what you’re chasing. Vahe Arabian: This makes sense. That’s a good way to the point. So, why choose Slack and what’s the idea behind how Online Geniuses got to where it is today? David Markovich: Funny enough, I‘m watching that happen with another community I recently started. I want to connect people. I do digital marketing together in a group. So, I put them on  Skype, and went through my Skype list. Then, I started adding other digital marketers on this group till I hit around 30 or 40 people. David Markovich: I started a Whatsapp group, with all the people I know in New York, who are well connected. Now, they wanna add their friends, and the group is expanding. It’s very similar to déjà vu. At some point we have like 300 people on the Skype group, and that was before you could  mute communities, and it was becoming very painful for people to be part of the community just because of how annoying it was. I found it  annoying too, and I discovered Slack. I moved the community over to Slack because people were used to chatting in the live chat or in the live chat type of ecosystem. So, I moved everyone over to Slack and we grew from there. Vahe Arabian: Did you ever consider Facebook groups, or like you said, you’re speaking about Reddit, how it’s a tough crowd, and I asked if you’ve sort of crossed that off the list when moving it over to Slack. Did you consider any other platforms, in your decision making? David Markovich: Yeah, I considered quite a few. Facebook and LinkedIn were totally out of the option because you don’t want to be so reliant on the platform, right? So, the more reliant you are on the platform, the lesser your control, and you almost have zero control on the Facebook or LinkedIn group. So, for example, if LinkedIn closes you down, the LinkedIn group or Facebook group is not active anymore, and it goes with the community. David Markovich: An aspect that was important, to me, was collecting everyone’s email address. Just in case whatever platform we’re on closes, it’ll be easy to migrate to something new, or if worse comes to worse, just turn it into our newsletter. I also wanted a platform, where we could set up a landing page, and you don’t really have that option in Facebook or LinkedIn. A landing page is a page, where people learn about the community, engage, and sign up to a newsletter. They can also see your social activities, meet-ups and AMAs. This means a lot, to me because my background is a search (seo). I wanted to make something that people could discover organically while searching online for our services. David Markovich: That’s why I chose Slack. The interesting thing about  was the channels. Since, digital marketing is a broad topic, I wanted to break down the community to different channels and what people are looking for. So, somebody might be  strong in paid ads, but very weak in email or wanted to learn SEO, and their background is analytics. I wanted people to find their own tribe within Online Geniuses. This would prevent other foreign communities from popping  up to solve that problem. So, they wouldn’t say, “Oh, that’s just broad digital marketing. It’s kinda messy. Why don’t you join our email marketing community?” Vahe Arabian: Yeah, I guess that provides a huge advantage. You can credit different channels which can help you answer those people who wanna look for a specific topics, and I’m assuming it’s gonna also provide you the ability to export those contacts. David Markovich: Yeah, you’re able to export the contacts. People are already using Slack during work, right? But when people use Facebook or Reddit during work, it’s considered inappropriate. You can’t be on Reddit when your manager is right behind you, or your cofounder is sitting there, but if you’re in a Slack group, people view the platform as a work-social network. So, you’re going there to learn more and make connections or do something productive but social. It’s very hard to differentiate whether you’re in a Facebook group or you’re talking to a high school friend when in a social network like that. Vahe Arabian: Yeah. How do you see the adoption of Slack recently? Do you think it continued to grow, because it might also depend ’cause you’re working on two different communities, how do they see the difference between that. As  a digital marketer, I see that ’cause we’re more digital oriented at the survey, we might adopt it more easily than a person in a different industry. David Markovich: Maybe, right? So, when Uber came out, it was the very technical app driven audience that was using Uber, at least out of my friends. So, my friends, who were in finance were still hailing cabs in New York City, and somebody was like, “Hey, check out Uber.” It’s more of that brain set off like the curious mind, and this is similar to marketers (we’re very curious). We’re willing to try new stuffs. we love to download things, criticize and find better solutions. That’s what makes us good marketers, I guess. Vahe Arabian: Yep, absolutely. David Markovich: But now, everyone uses Uber, and it’s slowly, slowly adapted fast where it’s like, “Wait, I could download an app and get me the car, and it made it easy.” I think that’s where Slack’s heading. I onboarded quite a few companies to Slack, and I dealt with all age demographics. As you were saying, some departments, because they have no interest, right? They’re kind of happy where they are and don’t see the need or don’t want to expand on what they’re using. They don’t wanna use their brain power to learn something new. They’re kind of set in their ways, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing because for certain departments that’s exactly the mindset you need. David Markovich: Like you’re working in compliance, you don’t want social media in compliance to have a marketer’s mindset like, “maybe we could do this! maybe we could do this!” You want someone, who’s  like, “Hey, this is what’s going on, and we have to stay in this lane.” But I think slowly, it’s gonna be readopted, and if not ready all around, like they’re set up with [Hipper 00:10:37], they’ve got high security standards, and there’s no reason some super large corporations who haven’t adapted Slack should do so. Vahe Arabian: Yeah, my group is definitely going to Slack. I’m in the same bowl as you. I agree with that. So, let’s go back to the journey of explaining how OJ became what it is today. You spoke about how you had Skype, and grew your initial list; it grew out, then you moved all of it to the Slack platform. What were some challenges and what were some key milestones you achieved to get to your first thousands? David Markovich: Yeah, so initially, I was impulsive, so I decided, “Hey, I didn’t want this Skype group …” A lot of works are related in the Skype group, and there was a lot of connections there —  people I liked hearing from. I made up my mind we’re gonna move to Slack. A lot of the comments were like, “What is Slack?” That’s how early it was. Like, “What is Slack?” I’m like, “No, it’s a platform. It has started out. It’s quite interesting.” Nobody wanted to move, so everyone thought the Skype community was over ’cause most of the community migrated to Slack, and a few were in Skype. Some had no interest in communicating in the community. So, it was a tough time till I threw up a landing page and onlinegeniuses.com. The community was branded as a Slack community and started different growth channels to build that up. David Markovich: I remember, when I hit like 500 and the activities rolled. I realized that this could work. I’m just gonna have to keep on pushing at this. It was just a lot of debates with people, like, “Hey, why didn’t you expand this?” A lot of conversations we kind of touched upon. Like, “Why are you using this plat …?” There were many people in the community advising me. Like, “Why don’t you use this platform? Why don’t you use this? Why don’t you use this? Oh, this is gonna be terrible. Slack …” David Markovich: I was just like, “You know what? I already made the move. I’m gonna stick to my guns and I’m gonna make this work.” That was a big moment. And then when I monetized, as time grew on and we hit like 100,000 messages, 200,000 messages, I realized it was working. With time, we monetized, hosted in-person events, and became recognized within the industry. It was very satisfying, especially that during the big transition I thought I lost it all, so it felt rewarding that it worked, and it worked. I’m not saying it worked the best, but it worked to the best of my abilities to push this alone. Vahe Arabian: No, I definitely see the people you bring on and how people engage in the community. You’ve reached significant accomplishments. It‘s amazing what you’ve been able to achieve. I believe you’re the largest Slack community. No! There’s probably someone else which is around the 40,000, but I think you’re one of the biggest Slack communities online at the moment. Is that correct? David Markovich: Yeah, I haven’t come across many other communities that are bigger. I think iOS developers is 20,000, and that’s the biggest I’ve seen. So, hopefully, we’ll be, but I’m not chasing numbers. So, if I wanted to reach 50,000, I could do that. We could just accept everyone and kinda work backwards by accommodating destructive people we once removed. Instead, we went the other route, and we realized we don’t want massive numbers. We don’t want massive engagements. All we want is high quality people that wanna learn. David Markovich: Through that, we didn’t have to ban many people. We didn’t have to worry about spammers. So, I don’t know if we’re the biggest. I haven’t come across that many that were bigger; like I told you once, but we’re definitely the most engaged. Vahe Arabian: Yeah, I think you guys are one of the most engaged, from what I’ve seen. David, do you think 500 is like the magic number where if someone is gonna put a goal into their mind and say, “Okay, I need to test this to make sure it works or like to validate the concept of the community Slack”. Do you think 500 might be the magic number?” David Markovich: It matters of the community. So, I launched the community six months ago, and I had 20 people. I was ecstatic, and I was like, “Wow, this is proof.” Because it was just specific and there’s not that many people. The people I was looking for was only in like less than 500. So, a good metric is you look at other communities and you see how big is the industry, and how big is the industry, how many people in the industry use the platform I‘m launching this community on? And figure out a goal number, and then from there you could break out particular goals. David Markovich: So, if the industry is 100,000 people, and out of those 100,000, you establish that 200,000 of them use Facebook. Your goal should be, if you’re launching a Facebook group, 2,000 people should join this group, right? 10% of a possibility. If you grow larger, then you exceeded your goal. Vahe Arabian: That’s great. This analogy provides the information to people, who want to be realistic because people might seek to get the biggest numbers. And if they haven’t seized what else is there aligned, and then setting themselves up professionally (it’s not advisable). So I appreciate you saying that. You also mentioned quite a few times in the conversation around the number of messages as a metric. Why is that? David Markovich: I’ve said this before. I think it’s fairly easy to create a community. I’ve worked with companies who built a community and they’ll put a tremendous amount of money in ads. Then, get a ton of people to join a Slack group, another platform or forum, and there’s not that much engagement, right? So, grow, tempting people to sign up to a newsletter is fairly easy. Getting people to open anything newsletter and engage or refer their friends is the hard part. Vahe Arabian: So, actually it’s a key metric you used to measure engagement, and also is it something you also present to potential advertisers or people who are interested in monetizing the community? David Markovich: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, numbers, there’re newsletters out there with million people I wouldn’t give a dollar to be in there, right? We talk about Facebook groups. There’re Facebook groups with no engagement, and engagement is quite important. It should be the most important metric you present. Vahe Arabian: Just briefly on this topic. Are there any other qualitative metrics to engage the metrics you measure or look at? David Markovich: Yeah, organic growth is an enormous metric I look at. Like how many people are joining from word of mouth? That’s like an important metric I look at, and that’s actually how we get most of our users now. So I’m pretty satisfied with that metric. People telling their friends, “are they finding this useful?”, I’ve realized. I’ve done surveys in the past and it is they’re the people, the members, that are unhappy or the members that are dissatisfied with the community so far. But what really matters is, “are you telling your friends about this?” David Markovich: Are you interested in this so much that you’re gonna go to your community or your friends’ group and say, “Hey, join Online Geniuses. I’ve got a lot of knowledge out of there. I made a hire out of there.” There’s a metric I look at. So, if it’s organically growing with a word of mouth, and there’s such tremendous amount of messages, then I think that’s a precious indicator that this is a social community? Vahe Arabian: So, organic growth, I guess you’ve got to look at the gross acquisition channels, and then from that determine whether it’s organic search or those channels, and then that’s your overall organic growth KPI? David Markovich: Yeah, so we ask everyone when they joined or how they heared about us, and a lot of it is by word of mouth. Vahe Arabian: It makes sense. What do you find these days, in terms of growth acquisition? what channels do you find that helps, I know it’s gonna be very different, depending on your different niches. But for people in digital marketing, what do you find the best quality acquisition channel to start off with at least? David Markovich: So far it‘s a research. People are searching for communities on Google. Like, “Hey, we’re gonna chat with people about PPC, and hope to show up in those types of search terms,” and it’s been working pretty well. Vahe Arabian: Okay. So, you spoke about that, and you’ve reached a point where you started monetization. What does monetization look like in online communities, and what’s the perfect way to monetize with no compromise on quality. What’s your company is all about? David Markovich: We call them partners. We don’t call them sponsors ’cause the way we get them is via partnership. We also vet sponsors or partners the same way we vet members. We let no one get in front of our community because, we’ve got that trust factor of like, “Hey, there’s only so many times we can mess up before another community comes to take our place.” So, we work with sponsors and have the pleasure of working with some of my favorite tools. We have a form that people fill. David Markovich: When you join Online Geniuses, we provide you a check box and say “do you want to push your product to Online Geniuses?” Right away, we have a bunch of warm leads right off the bat, and then we have someone look through those and say, “Hey, what is the community looking for, and how could we arrange something between them?” We’ve been happy with how that’s been going, and when you’re in a community, it’s either you’re paying for it or someone else is paying for you to be there. We rather let people come in free and somebody else pay for them to be there, which is like a sponsor to get in front of them and with no compromise on quality, on either side of the spectrum, and it’s been working. So we‘re happy about that. Vahe Arabian: What are some favorable moments and sponsorships you’ve been able to put together, which has benefited the community, and what’s been the impact of that? David Markovich: So, one of my favorite moments, when we got some superb AMAs. And so like early on we got the VP audience development at TechCrunch to do an AMA, Travis Bernard. Vahe Arabian: Nice. David Markovich: Yeah, nice guy. Vahe Arabian: Yep, I know. David Markovich: It was really a big moment for our team because we read and still read TechCrunch all the time, and they do a great job with audience development. It’s  likely they’re doing the best job with audience development in the technical new space. That was a big deal, then. When we got a sponsorship from SEMrush (they’re one of our largest sponsors now) and that was a big moment because we all use SEMrush, and when they came to us, and we worked something out, it was a big moment. They were like, “Hey, one of our favorite softwares came to us, wanted to do a deal, and it made a big impact and it showed the community we’re able to make moves.” I think another big part was probably when we hit like 5,000 members. David Markovich: I remember that day when I was like, “Wow, 5,000 people.” Like I haven’t been to conferences where there were 5,000 people. This is global, and these are people with different cultures and different tactics and I became friends with a lot. So, 5,000 was a fairly big point in our community. I think also, yeah, we got like Gary Vaynerchuk to do something with us, and that was big moment. But I think overall, like I think a big moment will be the day we hit like two million messages, and I think when we’ll  do more unique in-person meet-ups. I like gathering people in locations where they don’t normally meet and discuss marketing. So, we did one in Tunisia, Africa. Vahe Arabian: Wow. David Markovich: That was nice. We’re trying to do more in some remote locations, and that’s something I get involved with. I don’t normally get involved with the meet-ups. They’re usually chapter leaders from within the community that gets supported by a local organizer, but we like these specific ones where we never had a marketing meet-up ever in this location, and that’s when we get involved. That’s when I’ll get involved and try to make it work. Vahe Arabian: It’s awesome that you’ve got to that level of having those local chapters and everything around that. Yeah, to the point of local captivities and advocacy, did you find that there are people naturally say, “I want to get more involved,” or you hired more people? How did that process work once you came to a point where you were fairly flexible as a community? David Markovich: Yeah, so as someone who has been running communities my whole working life, I always get those emails. Like, “I wanna help out.” It’s really an email that just says that. Where it’s just like, “I wanna help out.” And you’re like, “Oh, cool. With what?” And they’re like, “I’m not sure.” So with outreach like that, like I sometimes create like, “Hey, what are your strengths.” I know people they wanna get involved, they’re just not sure how. I actually really appreciate that. David Markovich: I appreciate, like I’m willing to do it. I wanna help out. I use this community and I wanna help out, but it’s superb when someone is like, “Hey, I’m in Detroit. I see a lot of other people are located there and I would love to run an event for Online Geniuses.” And then that’s when we see things roll in the action and moves being made. When people come in and they wanna volunteer, they wanna help out with just a direct idea and make it come to life. Vahe Arabian: So, do you find that more often or do you also go out and recruit people as well? David Markovich: I started doing that. So, when I first started the local meet-ups, which we don’t really do that often anymore. It became super time consuming, and also like we would build up a meet-up for a person we never met, so we would like, “Hey, this is the Online Geniuses meet-up in this location. Help them around their first two meet-ups, and then say, ‘Okay, now it’s in your hands.'” And what they would do is to just re-brand it as their own, take their members and start their own meet-up, which is like very entrepreneurial of them. But they used us as a stepping stone to do this, and now they run a meet-up, and they’ll start their own mini-community, which I see many times fail, and a lot of it is based on Online Geniuses. David Markovich: So, we kinda put a hold on that. It was just a lot of work. Like it was a lot of handholdings for folks who run communities, and then sometimes eventually just as some of our biggest meet-ups just either died out or went to go start their own brand. It’s a big issue. I have friends, so like Courtland from Indie Hackers, some other friends who do a lot of these global meet-ups under one brand, and It’s very hard, like you end up putting in a lot of hours to manage these and make sure everyone gets supported. So somewhat, we have a few that have been running and they perform well but regarding expansion, that’s been on hold. David Markovich: So, when I first decided that I wanted to do meet-ups globally, I reached out to a lot of these marketing meet-ups that were dying, and I reached out to them and said, “Hey, we have this brand. We’d love you to be a part of this so we could help you get speakers and space. How about you revive this?” A lot said yeah. So, you build out this massive network of people who run meet-ups, and we could get them all into one place and help each other to build relationships and use Online Geniuses as a parent organization to help them grow. We put together a huge talk about how to expand meet-ups and how to grow them, and we found it to be good. Only thar it was super time consuming, and we’re not a big team. It’s quite the opposite, they’ve been on hold for a little. Vahe Arabian: That’s interesting. That’s definitely a challenge, and would you say there’re other examples you’ve seen online that worked? I know it’s time-consuming, but you said in the firewalls that there’s one of them that does. Do you know of any other example? Do other products do more of them? I’m not sure what they’re doing these days in terms of local community events, but do you know other ones that work fairly well? David Markovich: I think Startup Grind does a good job. I‘ve not come across too many marketing ones. That was the issue as well. It was just not that many people were doing what we were doing, and it was hard to a look at others for inspiration, and it was kinda like teaching myself how to do this from scratch. Like how do we manage 30 people all running events around the globe? How do we delegate time for each of these? How do we find the right support? How do we prevent errors from happening? How do we make sure everyone feels they’re part of this? We didn’t have a lot of inspiration, and a lot of it was just learning ourselves. I think when we run the meet-ups again; I think now we learned a lot of lessons and we hope for them to be loudly successful. Vahe Arabian: So, without going too deep, I guess, I don’t wanna share too much of your experience.  But to get more of your message, what are some things you’ll do differently next time? David Markovich: So initially, I was paying the organizers for all the meet-ups. So, that was a enormous issue. It was like every quarter almost $1,000 just for the meet-ups fees. People weren’t running meet-ups during that time. Like, “Oh, no, I don’t wanna run a meet-up.” We have to foot the bill. Now, “Hey, you wanna start a meet-up? We’ll help you with this. We’ll bring this to the table, you’ll bring this.” Part of that is you pay your monthly fee for your meet-up. That was like a little encouragement to keep the meet-ups going, where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re paying for something.” David Markovich: That’s been working, and once we hand it over the full control of the meet-ups to the organizers, they ended up putting more effort and work harder. This kinda feeling like it’s more the baby and they can’t get kicked out. It’s their priority, and they’re just using our brand and we’ll do whatever we can to fill the meet-up up, and in return they push these local cities, which grow the communities from a perspective. Vahe Arabian: It makes sense. So, making them as accountable as possible, I guess, is to give them that freedom, but have faith was in the brand as well? David Markovich: Exactly, you need more skin in the game to move this forward. I think about it as a limited time, like I would fully focus on the meet-ups because I really enjoy, and I think a ton gets accomplished when like-minded people get into a room together to discuss things. I think it’s a great way, and I met some of my strongest business partners and I wanna pass that over, and I’m a big believer in karma, the strongest believer in karma. I’m like what goes around definitely comes back around. Vahe Arabian: Absolutely. David Markovich: And if we make these ripples from around the glob, we have the potential to do so, and a lot of those ripples from around the globe will come right back to Online Geniuses. We’ve seen that happen, and we’ve seen that happen for some time. Vahe Arabian: Absolutely, because it’s about how you leave your impression on other people. I agree 100% and I’m on board with karma. So, David, just coming back to onboarding. How is the online Slack group now? Do you have the team of moderators? How does that work? David Markovich: Yes, so we’re like a team of like 15 moderators in different time zones so they can moderate the different channels and spams and stuff like that, so very helpful. It’s impossible to read through everything every hour, just it’s a lot of time. So, when it’s split up with the moderators and myself and some of my team, it makes it a strong community. You think you could just leave a community alone and they’ll just grow? It’s wrong, and that’s something I talk about a lot. Like you have to feed the dungeon to keep it rolling, and make sure that the community is as strong as possible, at every moment. David Markovich: So, like, “Hey, what are the other ideas that some other communities are growing, and what are tools that people are adapting to that you can integrate it in the community?” We found that to be very helpful. Vahe Arabian: Absolutely, and with the moderators, are they mostly part of your time or is it a combination of community members who’ve also stepped up as well? What’s the split of that? David Markovich: Yeah, it’s mostly community members who stepped up to the plate and said, “Hey, I wanna help out.” Like we kind of touched up on this earlier like, “Hey, I wanna help out with the community.” “Oh, cool. When do you wanna help out with being a moderator?” Bring them on board, and we have like an onboarding session we could go through. Vahe Arabian: Awesome. Yeah, onboarding aspect and having the processes and tools in places. It definitely helps with that. So, what are the tools, the onboarding processes to used to help really make your day-to-day go smooth as possible? David Markovich: Yeah, if everyone understands, it’s mostly for the moderators. We try to bend as much as possible, because we knew always there was a lot of room for error within the community, specifically for people who just joined, so they might say, “Hey, I joined this community. This is a tool I’m working on, and I built it.” Other members who’ve been a part of the community for quite some time might like, “Hey, you’re spamming our community. Ban this person.” And we’re all like, “No, this person just joined.” Error. We’ll warn them, point them in the right direction, “Hey, this is where you should post this.” Usually they follow, right? David Markovich: For instance, I like to assume what people who come into and end up spamming or not doing it maliciously just because of our vetting process. Most times it’s an error. Like I’ll get an apology: Hey David, I’m sorry that I placed it in the wrong channel. Where could I post this or where could I ask for this? David Markovich: I get those questions and I respond to every single one. The big thing is before we ban someone, we warn them, and if we ban we put it in a Google Docs, or for example, if they come back and like, “Hey, why did I get banned?” And since there are so many moderators that answer, “Hey, you got warned twice, and you’ve just been continuously doing this, and we’re getting complaints from the community, and we’re trying to keep this as strong as possible and are making this weaker and you’re making it hard.” They don’t realize that they’re not humanizing the communities or they don’t see it as human. They see this as a channel they could blast. David Markovich: So, they go on a Facebook group, they go on LinkedIn, and they go on Reddit, they go on Twitter, and they go on Online Geniuses, and like, “Hey, let’s blast this.” And we’re like, “No, we don’t want this. Now, you’re not gonna be a part of our community anymore.” Vahe Arabian: Yeah, absolutely. David Markovich: Yeah, and that’s the thing David Markovich: And that’s why we don’t charge, right? ’cause I don’t want, “Oh, no, wait. This person is paying. I don’t wanna ban. Like I want just the quality to stay strong, and I want nothing else to be controlled by everyone. We had sponsors. We had to tell them like, “Hey, we’re getting complaints about you. Is it possible you could do it this way?” And so on. And people should know the rules. So, right? When you sign up to Online Geniuses, you get an email where it’s exactly what our rules are. And then till you get it’s like around two weeks, so hopefully you remember, and when you join the community, we have a custom-made bot we made that messages you and says, “Hey, this is the rules. Introduce yourself, share where you’re at if you wanna post. If you wanna share something you’re working on, you wanna share an article, you will go into the Shameless blog channel. If you’re looking to hire go into this channel.” David Markovich: Like we’re trying to keep everything organized ’cause there’s a lot of people and there’s a tremendous amount of engagement and we don’t want a few people to ruin it for everyone, where someone is like, “Okay, this is for a spam. I’m not getting engaged anymore.” We don’t want that way too much work and way too much time into making it happen. Vahe Arabian: How did you make that happen in the earlier days’cause especially for a small community you find that people who found around the communities get it up and running and they post a lot of stuff to get an engagement from people but that might seem from the users’ side they’re spamming or maybe they’re parading themselves or it’s just bombarding them with too much messages. How do you find the right balance in getting people to engage? David Markovich: It has to happen naturally. So, if the person that runs the community is the most active person in the community, you don’t really have a community. You have a feed that people follow along with your ad. Vahe Arabian: Yeah. David Markovich: Right? So if it’s just you, and I’m part of some groups like that, which are not mine particularly. The person, who runs the community, the founder of the community, is the most active person 90% of the time, so you don’t really run a community. It’s just you talking and people hanging around and there are better platforms to create something like that than building a community. I’m not that engaged in our community. I rarely share, and I focus on like, “Hey, how can I grow this community and how can we get more qualified members and stuff of that?” The engagement I want to happen organically, then if it doesn’t then it’s just not a strong community. So that’s what I was telling you, so almost 0% of the engagement is driven by us. Vahe Arabian: So that’s what helps with onboarding and some things you mentioned earlier that really, really helps people to get more active. David Markovich: Yep. Vahe Arabian: I guess. David Markovich: Exactly. Vahe Arabian: Awesome. So let’s look at some trends and looking forward to OJ. So, with a lot of communities and with digital marketing and the field, what do you think are the things people are speaking about in the communities that you can’t find anywhere else online that you think, “Wow, that’s awesome?” David Markovich: Man, I think anything spoken about in Online Geniuses are all likely be spoken in other places Online — like hot topics obviously from like a high level artificial intelligence is just the hot topic and we’re talking about real machine learning where it’s not like you call a product AI and realize it’s just matching, right? Like we’re artificial intelligence. We’re the computer teachers itself, right? Like not a recommendation algorithm where it actually could expand, and that’s very, very interesting for marketers, ’cause if the algorithm could continuously teach itself when to send out an email, right? David Markovich: So, if it could send this email works at December, people have a enormous open rate around 11 o’clock Pacific Standard Time, all right? So, every December they do that, and the click through rate is on this call of the button, and if the computer could teach itself that. So, that’s a hard topic, and understanding when it fits into marketers, right? So, if you’re an eCommerce shop selling clothing, what’s the best solution if somebody from Alaska visits your site versus Miami Beach, Florida? Shouldn’t it show them different clothings? David Markovich: And understanding that, and there are tools that exist, and which tools are the best, and who’s gonna be the strongest about this, and which open source platforms can you use this like for artificial intelligence for either building your own tools or implementing an a tool anything already exists. Very interesting stuff that’s like when will AI be able to rate your own content and how powerful will that content be? Or how does AI play a part in SEO, and where is that gonna go? David Markovich: Because it’s gonna come, and then a lot of industries are gonna collapse, and the ones that are gonna be the strongest are the ones that think AI or really understand it enough to use it the strongest. Vahe Arabian: This is true. You’ve seen a lot of engagement conversation, and have you heard direct feedback from people who’ve taken advice from other people in the community and have you see those case studies anywhere else online that you said, “Well, that’s because of being part of the community?” David Markovich: Yeah, so for a while, every Thursday, we did CRO Tear Down, and I’ve seen firsthand people changing their website through the feedback they’ve gotten in there. When we bring an AMA guest, the AMA guest might share something that somebody might’ve been working on for two months and might solve their problem in two seconds, right? And I’ve seen those things come to life, and a lot of times, I’ll make on my calendar to see, “Hey, like this is my site. What could I change to higher the conversion?” And I’ll see the feedback they get and put it into account or like a month from now to check in this side to see if it got implemented just out of curiosity, and most times it has. David Markovich: So, I see it but it’s very hard to do that. It’s a manual process so a lot of times when I discover whatever impact Online Geniuses have had, it’s when I meet members in person or they reach out to me and say, “Hey, I made this higher. Me and this old guy partnered, and we founded a business together, or I got this client.” And then it’s very important, like it’s very important to show appreciation to the chain, right? So, if you met someone in Online Geniuses and they introduce you to someone, and then they introduce you to someone, and now you’re co-founder you should go back up the line and thank to all those people. David Markovich: Getting a friend to introduce me to it, this person you could say thank you for introducing me to this, and hey, David, I thank you for having me in Online Geniuses because all those happened. The reason it’s important is that you’ll always be top of mind ’cause gratitude always pays off. I see it a lot. I see it a lot on the opposite side of the spectrum where people do tremendous things within Online Geniuses and they go to the next part of their life, and I’ve seen people make moves and they send you a really nice email with a lot of gratitude, and it helps. You have the respect of the chain. David Markovich: I tried doing that. Like I’m speaking to myself right now as I say because I try to do that too, because life moves so fast and sometimes you forget, “Hey, where was this link that connected me here? How did I end up here? Into this position?” A lot of time, if you think them firstly,  it’s an easy way to open a conversation with somebody you haven’t spoken to in a while like, “Hey, I wanna thank you that this happened.” You almost get a response because it’s just so unfortunate people are grateful. Vahe Arabian: I agree. Usually ’cause you get this generalized messages asking you for paid things instead of getting thank you, so it’s definitely different, yeah. David Markovich: Yeah, I get like 30 emails a week asking me, first off. People I haven’t spoken to in forever, like not even like a hello, hey. It’s just like can you introduce me to this person? And I’m like I don’t even know what the purpose is, and you’re gonna ask me to introduce you to a friend of mine? Like let me explain … So, it‘s tough, right? There’s a lot of takers out there. There’ll like, “Hey, how could I suck out the most out of this?” You see that in Online Geniuses. Like, “How could I get a boost out of this? How could I take the most?” And then there‘re others who’re like, “How could I give the most to this community?” Vahe Arabian: Exactly. David Markovich: Those end up becoming moderators. Those end up becoming in my life that ask me for favors I’ll, “Oh, it’s returned.”. Vahe Arabian: It’s a glass half full versus half empty. David Markovich: No, or just like hey, the people are like ‘I wanna get …” And then there’re matchers like, “Hey, I got something from …” You scratch my back, I scratch.” There’re others who just unconditionally give. That’s more aligned to my personality ’cause that’s how I grew up, and that’s how I try to live my life so I relate more to those people who are just natural givers. David Markovich: When you meet them, you’ll see. Transparently they’re just, “Hey, I wanna give.” I told you, I made a group in WhatsApp recently, and it’s doing well. Like I said, I couldn’t handpick better people. Everyone has a few things in common in the group. One is that they have massive networks, so they’re like me. They run a community or they do something where they have them meet a lot of different people and they have these networks and they’re well liked. They end up taking advantages of these connections that the make, and the other thing is that they’re givers. So, in our group, we don’t have to worry about like if someone needs something and there’s only like 30 people in it, you’ll get it done if someone in the group could help you. David Markovich: It’s not like there’s landing page about it. It’s like people I’ve met in my life, who I’m like, “I wanna introduce you to some people that are closest in my life, and I wanna see how this expands.” Good things have happened. Vahe Arabian: Yeah. Yeah, not going to repeat the same thing, but I agree 100%  with you on this. How do you share some wins with your team? When you’re picking out one of these wins, how do you keep them motivated as well. To make sure they’re providing extra for the best, like you did for the community? David Markovich: Ours are very transparent. So, several of our accomplishments within the community are very transparent. When we are at a certain level of engagements we announce them, when we get certain guests we’ve been trying to get, when we get certain partners that like everything is very transparent, and I think builds it. That builds up, it’s like compounds every time something good really happens, ’cause it’s all chain reaction. If we get a superb partner, the partner might push us, or he might get us another partner which might get us a guest which might get us in a publication which gets a lot of sign-ups. It keeps on flowing. It compounds on top of each other, and I think it’s very transparent. Vahe Arabian: Yeah, so having everything transparent provides the compounding effect and motivates people to keep going. So, yeah, that makes sense. David, I guess just to finish on a high note, what do you see next year’s plans? ‘Cause at the time of this recording, we’re recording at December, so what do you see next year’s plan and your direction moving forward for OJ, and your new communities you started? David Markovich: Yes, I’m running few communities and I hope that they all just continue to grow Online Geniuses, and particular gets to 30,000 members hopefully next December. We grow 60% last year, hoping to grow 100% this year. We still want the same strategy of organic growth, and how knows, maybe this podcast is the tipping point. Vahe Arabian: I hope I can definitely play a role in that, so I thank you so much for your time, David, I really appreciate it. David Markovich: Thank you for your time. Really, likewise, I appreciate you having me. Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this episode of the State of Digital Publishing podcast. Listen to past and upcoming episodes across all major podcast networks. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and join our community groups. Finally, visit stateofdigitalpublishing.com for premium information, resources and become a member today. Until next time.     Support the show.

In this episode #19 of Automate and Grow I talk with David Markovich from Online Genius Slack Group that has grown into a powerhouse community of some of the brightest and boldest Internet personalities and marketing experts. Marketing personalities like Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin have done AMAs (Ask Me Anything) in the …

In this episode of FEAR NOT, founder of Online Geniuses and Jumping Squirrel, David Markovich talks about facing his fears of failure.

On this episode, the founder of Online Geniuses, David Markovich shares how he grew a Slack group into the largest online community for marketers, with over 9000 members. David is the founder of the largest marketing community on Slack, with over 9000 members in the group, and over 20,000 members attending events worldwide. David is here to share some of the tips and tricks he’s learned over the years in building that community, so that if you’re looking to build or grow your own online community, you'll have the best tools at your disposal. Click here for the full show notes and links!

In Episode #458, Eric and Neil discuss how to network with other marketers. Tune in to learn how organizing a small dinner can help you connect with people and why it is important to engage with people on the same level. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: How to Network With Other Marketers 00:32 – Eric and Neil ended up networking with other marketers when they visited their friend in Toronto 00:49 – Throw an event or small dinner 01:06 – You can meet marketers by participating on the web 01:36 – Host a Zoom meeting for mastermind work 01:54 – Make sure you're connecting with people at your level 02:35 – There are a lot of marketers on Slack groups, such as Buffer and Online Geniuses 03:12 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:22 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:26 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Hosting a small dinner and inviting people into your network can help you forge new relationships. Make sure that you also add value to those you wish to network with. Leverage the internet—you can grow your network online. 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 #458, Eric and Neil discuss how to network with other marketers. Tune in to learn how organizing a small dinner can help you connect with people and why it is important to engage with people on the same level. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Network With Other Marketers 00:32 – Eric and Neil ended up networking with other marketers when they visited their friend in Toronto 00:49 – Throw an event or small dinner 01:06 – You can meet marketers by participating on the web 01:36 – Host a Zoom meeting for mastermind work 01:54 – Make sure you’re connecting with people at your level 02:35 – There are a lot of marketers on Slack groups, such as Buffer and Online Geniuses 03:12 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:22 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:26 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Hosting a small dinner and inviting people into your network can help you forge new relationships. Make sure that you also add value to those you wish to network with. Leverage the internet—you can grow your network online. 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

David Markovich is the Founder and CEO of Online Geniuses (OG), a community that he has built online using Slack with over 8,000 members. Several of our past guests have mentioned this community to us and so we wanted to learn more about this group! Listen to David talk about how he came up with the idea for Online Geniuses, how it was to move the group from Skype to Slack, and find out about the meetups in different cities across the world!

In this episode of the MarTech Wiz podcast, we interview David Markovich of Online Geniuses, a digital marketing community with over 8000 members and events in 25 cities globally.Listen to Podcast:David is always moving a hundred miles a minute so it was great to sit down with him for 30 minutes and pick his brain.We cover everything from the start of Online Geniuses to its current hockey stick growth to future plans of the community.Along the way, we learn keys to maintaining vibrant communities online and off, how anyone can find their hustle, and why David always talks to his competition.I'd recommend joining the community over at onlinegeniuses.com. It's a great online space with various gems from digital marketers you can only find inside the slack channel.David Markovich has hustle second to none. David is constantly striving for (as the song goes) harder, better, faster, stronger.But what really stands out to me about David in this interview and in person is how passionate and generous he is with making introductions that can impact lives.Make sure to join the slack community and attend a local OG event if possible. It's a great digital marketing community unlike any I've seen.

David Markovich he is a community builder and digital marketing consultant for some of the top organizations in the country including Google and Comedy Central. He has also found a few online communities including Online Genuises that hosts events in over 25 cities and has over 15000 members in their online community. Name: David Markovich Job Title: Founder Instagram Handle: thedavidmarkovich Name of Business: Online Geniuses Website: onlinegeniuses.com

David Markovich talks about his interest in information, the need to explore who we are , and why people make him happy. David is the founder of Online Geniuses (www.onlinegeniuses.com) www.thehappypodcast.com/episode57 The post 57. David Markovich: Invisible Energy appeared first on This Makes Me Happy.

David Markovich talks about his interest in information, the need to explore who we are , and why people make him happy. David is the founder of Online Geniuses (www.onlinegeniuses.com) www.thehappypodcast.com/episode57

Motivation with David Markovich. On today's episode, we have an amazing chat with David Markovich from Online Geniuses, the founder of a 20,000 people Slack community for marketers. David Markovich grew this community from 200 to 20,000 members, providing incredible content to all its members including meetups and conferences around the country. David's passion towards communities led him to create a very engaging community and has become one of the top places to hang out if you're an online marketer. Although Online Geniuses started as a Skype Community, David knew that if he wanted the community to grow exponentially he was going to need a more efficient platform than Skype, that's when they moved on to Slack (A super useful tool for communication and real time chatting). Although David agrees that entrepreneurship is hard, he shared with us what kept him going and why he did not quit when things got though. He also taught us that the big secret of success and how he's able to stay ahead of the next trend and act with perfect timing.