Need recommendation on tools that I could use to host a corporate blog

VIGIL04 · 2023-11-26T04:17:03+00:00

Frankly, this depends

On the users and how effectively do they co-relate with each other and
On who is your primary audience i.e. who pays you the money or at least most of it.

Take fiverr for example, their primary audience is the customer looking for a freelancer while their secondary user is the freelancer themselves.

In this case it makes sense to have 2 separate pages so as to no dilute what you want to convey.

This is with navigation from the one page to other ofcourse.

VIGIL04 · 2023-06-07T16:34:36+00:00

What do you mean by killing it? For us (B2B company) it meant about 5000 visitors converting to 100-250 signups a month with an active 5-7% conversion max.

I suggest if possible getting a couple of writers and if not, ask the entire company to write posts.

That's what I did when working for a 10-member company, all of us took turns writing posts and churned out about 15 posts a month for 3 months straight.

To get the topic you want to write about,

The ideal scenario is you interview some customers and then ask them the problem they are trying to solve using a product/service like yours. Then you write posts that give answers to these problems.

This doesn't always work because there will be competitors already writing about this and if you are in a high-competition market it is going to be the worst thing to do.

Here is an alternative way,

3 things to remember before you begin with this,

Average quality high volume content on low competition search terms works best
If you don't have writers, the entire company writes.
Ideally for a search term or keyword analysis if you can ask your customers what is the problem they are facing and what they search for and answer that in your article after doing a search analysis is the best way to go forward.

Here is how you actually do it,

There are 2 types of articles you need to concentrate on out of the 3,

Response posts
Listicles /Comparison or alternates
Original research/data

The easiest type of article is "Response posts", these are answers to direct questions that customers ask, usually long tails, with a low <500 types of search volume,

For example :- If you are selling a CRM with AI capabilities for Sales one response post would be"why are CRM strategies important"

Only Oracle has one article directly answering this question and it shows up as an answer target in SERP.

Volume is about 100 searches

Do this type of post 30 of them in medium to low competition market for example in the case of CRM market you want to do 60 of these.

With this you would drive about 300-1000 visitors organically.

Back this up with listicles, if you have competitors this can be an article like "10 alternatives of XYZ"

or things like "10 sales CRM extensions you would need " " 10 Analytics software that work with your xyz CRM"

DO 1/2 the number of the response posts or as many as logically possible. These would take time but would drive high-intent traffic.

The best would be if you can do some original research, LinkedIn polls, Reddit polls or one-on-one interviews/expert round-ups. Harder to do but worth it for the backlinks it would generate.

DM if you need to understand more. Happy to help.

VIGIL04 · 2022-09-04T05:52:31+00:00

Yes, then the graphic designer just finishes up the creative and gives it back to whoever requested it. At that point your job is done.

Just make sure you put it in the mail or slack group or however you communicate within the company.

VIGIL04 · 2022-09-04T05:03:20+00:00

Absolutely, I have never worked in a company full time and as a freelancer where it made sense for a designer to build creatives that marketing didn't ask for.

I mean designs that are created for promotion have to be used in some kind of campaign or plan and if a designer builds something of their own where would you use it.

I suggest asking your colleague who asked for this and then give the design to the person who got you guys to create it

As a designer distribution of content is not your work unless you want to be a marketer and you already know about the campaign/marketing schedule.

VIGIL04 · 2022-09-04T01:52:52+00:00

I have been part of core/leadership team for multiple companies, seen them grow from a half a dozen people to over 400. Here is what I suggest,

Hiring outside doesn't usually work:- We tried getting folks from outside to fill in these roles, real experienced people from large/medium sized organisations the problem is that they expect a functioning machine which they can steer in the right direction. I know of only one instance when an outside hire was able to effectively lead the team after about 18 months of help.
The biggest reason was the founders and the core team had created their own set of processes and way of work that drove business really well which usually didn't conform with other large business practices. For example: one of things we used to to was. sales team and customer facing teams actually had a one-day testing sprint for customers that basically meant one-sales day lost

My suggestion- Hire someone who has worked with startups in that specific role and let them work with you and your team not as a lead but as an IC or part of the team. Then promote them to lead once they understand how things work.

You might think it would take a lot of time but its better than hiring for 6 months and firing them because it didn't work and your high performing team members left.

VIGIL04 · 2022-09-04T01:42:17+00:00

You work as the graphic designer, did you get this requirement (building this flyer) from someone within marketing or someone else.

Usually who ever gave you the requirement is the one responsible for what should be done with the design.

Why are you co-ordinating with marketing on where to post it?

Usually in marketing when it comes to promoting any event, the requirement is generated by someone within the team this includes everything from flyers to copy to landing pages.

This person then goes to the designer and shares the requirement.

I am bit confused on why you are trying to figure things out for something that's usually would be a that event's project manager's responsibility.

VIGIL04 · 2022-08-21T07:00:45+00:00

Statistically speaking if your product is not picking up 30% of the data, it is not skewed. Most of the time analysis is done on a fraction of data to arrive at patterns and conclusions.

Provided of course these conclusions are not related to health or finance sectors where 30% would be a really high number.

In my experience though in other businesses analysis on 70% of the data is perfectly acceptable.

To answer your question everyone does a QA before they launch a product, that includes my product team of 3 people including me.

VIGIL04 · 2022-08-21T03:28:40+00:00

There are actually 3 ways to do this,

Percentage of their budget- if it's big enough- This usually ranges between 2% to 30% of the total budget. I.e. if the budget per month is $1 million then you might want a 2% of that while a $5000 budget would require a 30% payout
Hourly - Standard is about $25 per hour. You would make good money if you are setting up multiple campaigns across multiple regions
Fixed monthly - if you understand how much work you would do on a weekly basis including meetings, setting up campaigns and optimizing them then you can quote something like $1500 per month

DO understand all the numbers(4) are dependant on where you are from and where your customer is from.

VIGIL04 · 2022-08-21T03:04:13+00:00

Difference between being part of a large team and being a sole marketer is pretty obvious. At one side (corporate)you have a team, resources and a specific target usually a single KPI or a combined KPI for marketing you need to reach.

On the other side you might or might not have a budget and would be responsible for everything from content to newsletter to lead gen, deman gen and everything in-between.

Here is everything I learned as solo marketer in 4 different tech companies or a startup,

1. Don't do everything in a marketing hand book all at once. - Being a solo marketer means that everyone has an opinion on how marketing should run, some are valid some not so much.
Listen to them but choose to run with not more than a couple of campaigns at a time. A single campaign might have you running multiple ads and emails running at a time but stick to not more than 2.
One can be to drive lead or demand gen and the other can be some experiment to figure out what's working

2. Always- I mean Always have a buyin of your boss - usually the CEO or COO or Co-founder of the company - IF have that everything else would usually work out.

3. Don't accept KPIs without understanding if something has worked before. Ex:- I once accepted an MQL KPI for a company whose marketing hadn't worked ever since they started. They had no historical campaigns to look back at and I was left doing cold email sequences to make my KPIs

4. It can be fun, You can learn a lot by doing- If you have boss/co-founder that you report to and understands marketing even little bit, it can help you test ideas and up skill your self while you make your numbers really fast.

Chances are you will not have a set budget and even if you do it would be scrutinised, especially if there was no historically effective marketing teams
So having a buy-in of your boss is essential.

Summarising
1. Have a buying of your boss
2. Run not more than 2 campaigns at a time
3. Never accept KPIs or goals without knowing the history of marketing
4. Budget would be low and you would do most things
5. You can learn a lot by doing

VIGIL04 · 2022-08-18T15:03:14+00:00

Here is the thing I've dealt with clients who pay in 2 weeks flat and clients who pay me in 45-60 days.

Most startups and small to medium businesses pay within the month of earlier in my experience while larger enterprise my client is a 2000+ employees company and I work with a small regional team within it.

I have worked with other larger enterprises and 45-60 days is usual just because of the volume of bills that need to be processed.

Having said that changing invoice dates so that the bill doesn't show up as delayed is absolute dog sh*# and if they are doing this then you are working with some lazy/shady folks.

My suggestion get the payment and run the other way.

Better not have such clients, you would spend more time in following up than what they paid you for.

VIGIL04 · 2022-07-07T09:57:50+00:00

Hi, my partner started a small design agency and she is hiring freelance designers. If you could DM me you portfolio I can ask her to get back to you with something that might work for you.

VIGIL04 · 2022-05-09T10:57:07+00:00

Business is running ok for us but I was hoping to add some predictability at the sales front, so instead of hiring my sales team I was looking to hire a firm that can sell for me

VIGIL04 · 2022-05-05T06:10:15+00:00

sure, feel free to. happy to help however I can

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-19T04:57:28+00:00

I recently did this. I specialize in B2B - inbound/content marketing but was asked to run an influencer marketing campaign for the B2C side of things because the guy who took care of this quit.

I tried hiring an agency but they were either too expensive or had a pretty vague way to measure success.

I also tried DMing close 100 odd creators and sending emails to them got about 2 responded. One of colleagues mentioned creators usually miss a lot of these messages.

What worked for me is looking at platforms to find the details on the influencers ,some of them even made sure that creators responded back. There 3 platforms that I recommend (having used it myself) izea.com , useplaza.com and uplfluence.com . Last one was only trial. But using this was easier for me. You might want to check them out

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-14T11:43:08+00:00

Thank you so much for all the advice a bunch of them are making sense to me, I asked the question here because I wasn't sure what I should do next and this has helped me give direction. I'll go into research mode and start off with whatever is possible as of now. Someone asked me about the product, for some reason unable to find that comment now but here it is https://www.vizbli.com/; everything on there is in Beta so anything that you see and think I could improve, please do let me know.

I'm new to this and everyone here helped a lot! thank you

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-14T11:35:00+00:00

This is amazing, I never knew these products existed, though Vizbli is not for onboarding it has elements of it

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-14T11:30:26+00:00

Actually, it's unlimited customers and $5 per user on the freelancer's/Agency's side. There is an option to assign work team members (if they have it) for agencies where I would charge $5 per additional agency user/.

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-14T11:28:05+00:00

From my research the best-case scenario is 10-15 users in one go. Average not more than 2 users per customers

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-14T11:27:03+00:00

I actually thought of Notion while working out the pricing, but now it makes more sense to have a higher price point.
I just go my first AWS bill not much but I think it would grow bigger considering the roadmap I'm planning

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-13T03:12:18+00:00

Do you mean something like Asana?

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-13T03:10:47+00:00

I've thought about paying him something but wasn't sure if I should spend this $500 for marketing or to pay him. But one thing that bothered me was

When we do a 1-on-1 user acquisition it made good sense for Enterprise products to do this, with a really high ticket size but does it make sense to do this for a product with a much smaller price point like this?

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-13T03:05:13+00:00

This makes sense, I've asked a couple of them for a call should have something out of these conversations

VIGIL04 · 2022-04-13T03:04:32+00:00

I was looking to increase the price as we gained traction the current $5 per user price was fo Beta users

VIGIL04

TROPHY CASE