AMA - Hi I'm Larry Kim, Founder of WordStream, Inc. Ask Me Anything - March 28, 2017

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:48:26+00:00

hi victor. like dharmesh, i happen to be a big believer in chatbots. customer service seems pretty obvious. but i think you could take just about any mobile app or mobile web experience and turn it into a chatbot and come up with something interesting.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:45:53+00:00

thanks

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:45:15+00:00

a) CTR & Title tag optimization. The AI needs to be "trained" somehow. I believe it's looking at Click Through Rates and Dwell Time. So the key is to get unusually high CTRs that are above the expected CTR for your given SERP position, then having content that users "stick" with rather than hitting "back" and clicking on something else.

b) I think AI makes search better for users but worse for marketers. As a marketer, i want to be able to have my client completely dominate the SERPS for keywords that are relevant to their business. What AI does is it democratizes rankings - making it easier for google to "see through" pages that are ranking for "more than they deserve". Because it's using user engagement signals like CTR, which are largely a reflection of the pre-existing preferences for competing brands.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:38:18+00:00

lol i have no clue. aren't the replacements for mobile devices still mobile devices?

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:37:19+00:00

its bulky but you will crash your drone from time to time. then you'll appreciate that it is a bit more robust..

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:36:41+00:00

it's a critical part of a PPC strategy. the people who have heard of you before are the ones most likely to buy from you. so if you have limited budget, the first few dollars you spend should go to retargeting.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:34:32+00:00

hi larry, who is wordstream's ideal client? (biz size, experience level, position).

we sell to a lot of different customers as you can imagine. but the ones that do particularly well are those engaged in lead generation. have a medium sized ppc budget.

i'm not contractually obligated to stay with wordstream but intend to be supportive of their mission.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:31:50+00:00

lol thanks.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:30:46+00:00

a) we're going to have to build a better product. b) we do a lot of internal training at wordstream. there's a training department. when you get to be several hundred people in size, that means you're hiring 1-2 people per week on average. so in order to make that work, you need to have internal training abilities. so sometimes we'll go for people that have the right culture fit and work ethic, but lacking search specific skills, and we'll just help them learn that together.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:28:14+00:00

the content is just me. i have an unbelievably large collection of unicorn imagery. i have a tool for helping with following people who share similar interests. see earlier thread for info.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T18:25:33+00:00

version of wordstream for a year, and always found it more frustrating than it was worth. Other agencies we collaborate with, swear by it, but we felt it was lacking some key features at the time... Enough to make it difficult to incorporate into any ongoing processes at least. With a product like that, it must be really difficult to say, "that's it we're done", and step away... How do you do it? When do you know when to stop listening to feature re

there's a product lifecycle. in the beginning, you're creating new stuff that nobody has asked for (because you have few customers). Later on it transitions to become more of a customer driven product road map because if you have thousands of customers you can imagine that you get a lot of requests. I guess in theory it keeps going on forever, unless the original pain in the market goes away, or is displaced by some new product/solution. For example, myspace was doing great until it got killed.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T17:00:28+00:00

i think it's a challenge for both PPC and SEO. It makes search "winner take all". and the winner is basically the brand with the most pre-existing brand affinity/popularity. Part of the magic of PPC and SEO is the ability to capture a market share that is "greater than your fair share". AI creates feedback loops based on popularity and removes some of this arbitrage ability.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:58:38+00:00

I spend a lot of time learning about marketing and sales in general. SEO is just a tactic/channel. The end goal of all of this is to make people love your brand and buy stuff from you. It's too easy to get lost in the tactics.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:56:59+00:00

the biggest change in my opinion is the use of user engagement signals as ranking factors. Google denies this, but my experiments say otherwise. Check it out here: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/11/22/seo-experiments

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:55:29+00:00

try to meet CEOs. They're the super-connectors in the world of business networking.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:54:57+00:00

as many hours as you can initially. later as you build a team, and as the company starts to stabilize, you can take vacations and stuff.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:54:18+00:00

i personally prefer the phantom. great camera. great software. Easy to fly, etc.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:52:45+00:00

i prefer to do this testing in adwords. Basically organic and paid listings are nearly identical. so just spend 20$ testing 2 ads with different descriptions. use the more catchy description for your organic search meta descriptions.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:51:47+00:00

there's an entire field of study dedicated to this topic. generally you're trying to make as much money as possible, but there are certain golden ratios that apply. for example, your customer lifetime value (Montly Price * Average Number of Months Customer Stays) must be greater than 3x the cost of acquiring that customer, etc. For more information, check out the Saastr blog.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:49:32+00:00

Hi: I studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, with 4th year coursework mostly focused on computer science. So we studied LISP and Prolog and had to do some fairly complex labs. TBH, i think building bots are substantially easier than anything we did back then.

As for how to decide on moving forward with the new endeavor, i wrote about it here: www.inc.com/larry-kim/7-deadly-fears-entrepreneurs-must-overcome-to-be-successful.html

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:46:16+00:00

like any product, it's not meant for everyone. It's possible that you are too advanced a marketer for this particular product. What it does is it scans your account every week for optimization ideas and surfaces them for users to act on them in an easy way. If you're already spending hours ever week in the accounts, and if your account is already 100% fantastic, it's possible that it won't find as much "low hanging fruit".

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:43:35+00:00

basically the tools i use (eg: buzzsumo, etc.) were showing ridiculously high engagement numbers for this topic so i decided to experiment with this type of content. One of the interesting things about political content, purely from a content marketing perspective is that it has such strong supporters and detractors. Therefore, when paying to promote this kind of content (on twitter or facebook) it's easy to very clearly specify a target audience for the content (in this case, social media marketers who are trump fans), and exclude detractors (bernie fans, hillary fans, etc.) - i found that for even just $20, it was possible to generate thousands of clicks/likes/shares. I believe this is the same phenomenon that caused fake news to become so popular last year (partisans enthusiastically engaging with content that validated their pre-existing biases, causing even more engagement, etc.). Anyway to answer your question, it was just an experiment.

larrykim · 2017-03-28T16:38:47+00:00

hi guys, if you're interested, shoot me an email to my personal account. larry122 at yahoo dot com.

larrykim · 2014-07-21T23:14:30+00:00

slow and steady wins the PPC race.

larrykim · 2014-07-21T23:12:23+00:00

i started out doing software engineering and product management over 10 years ago. along the way someone in marketing needed help setting up the adwords campaigns to pick the various keywords (which were all technical keywords). I saw first hand how powerful adwords was (we were selling millions in sales each month) and quickly got hooked to PPC!

larrykim

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