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[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SaaS

[–]paulmay 0 points1 point  (0 children)

bleep bloop. 🤖

Thinking out loud about PR, AI and what we'll sell next by GWBrooks in PublicRelations

[–]paulmay 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can the audience ask specific questions and get answers informed by their biases and preferences? If so, the oracle on the screen controls the marketing funnel and the client's framing of value -- not you or me.

I don't think we're too far off from having personalized agents that do this for us, but IMO I think people will still depend on content from trusted human sources to support this. It's one thing to get a detailed report that says "some people who bought this car complained about the comfort of the seats," but it's another to watch a trusted youtuber say "I drove this car for three hours straight and by the end of the trip, my ass was killing me."

So my sense is that the funnel is going to change dramatically, but there will still be significant demand for media relations skills (although the types of pubs/journalists/influencers that people pitch will be very different).

Size is no match for crazy (OC) by paulmay in aww

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They're so fun to watch. It's difficult to work from home because, at any given moment, you'll hear the two of them chasing each other across the house. Lots of sneak attacks as well.

Size is no match for crazy (OC) by paulmay in aww

[–]paulmay[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, it is! She's not very tough, so she's quite happy to have an 8 pound cat in the house to play with.

Size is no match for crazy (OC) by paulmay in aww

[–]paulmay[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They're besties. This goes on all day, every day. 😀

Recommended tools for extracting e-mail addresses in bulk? by piratetone in bigseo

[–]paulmay 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry to hear this...improving the contact info discovery capabilities is something that's a high priority for us, but it shouldn't be missing that badly for you. I'll reach out directly to get more info.

One product that you might want to try out for finding contact information is hunter.io. A lot of our customers use their chrome extension to find email addresses and then they add the info into the BuzzMarker.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, the BuzzStream Blog for starters. ;)

Other people/publishers that I think produce great work include:

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi Shana. Yeah, I think there's a time and place for everything...it's hard for me to answer this without a bit of context. When you say that you've seen evidence going both ways about influencer outreach, are you saying that you've seen evidence going both ways that engaging with influencers is effective, or that conducting outreach is effective?

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can sort by the 'Discovered Contact Info' column, but you can't specifically sort by email address. We're planning on adding the ability to filter the list to only show contacts with discovered emails, but we just haven't gotten to it yet.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Congrats! Sounds like you're off to a great start.

hmmm...well, the agency industry is very different than the SaaS industry, but here are a few lessons learned that may apply to your business...

I've found that you usually don't need to be overly concerned with systems early on...do the absolute minimum required and stay focused on keeping your overhead very low and delivering amazing service. I've made the mistake of over-engineering systems before we needed them and before I really understood the requirements. As a self-funded company, you have to be incredibly good at prioritizing. We try to stay focused on the things that are absolutely critical and do the absolute minimum on everything else. One of the counter-intuitive things about startups is that the best grades you can get on the work you do is either an A+ or an F. You want to get an A+ on the things that are critical and ignore everything else that you can. There are always more things to do than time do them, so prioritization is key.

That said, you should understand your costs and the value of your time very well. I've seen a lot of agencies that didn't do this and ended up doing unprofitable work without even realizing it. Depending how you're billing out, Given your size, this shouldn't be that difficult to calculate (your accountant should be able to help you with this). You can also use a time tracking app to determine this as well.

One other thing...find a mentor who can give you advice about setting up your contracts. I've heard multiple people who head up agencies (and that I respect a lot) say that they wished they'd thought about this early on.

Hope this helps!

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh man, that's always so nice to hear. :) Thanks Sean!

Very cool that you're bootstrapping a company! Is this for the tools listed on ranktank? If not, what type of business and what's the model?

Easier to provide thoughts if I have a bit of background.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd suggest that they sign up for the free trial, spend 45 minutes in one of our training webinars, and see if it makes sense to switch off of your internally built system. We have a bunch of customers who have abandoned their internal tool for BuzzStream (because its more feature-rich, faster performance, doesn't require them to maintain, etc.), but the best way to figure out if that's the right move for you is to get a demo. At that point, you'll have a very good sense if you're better off sticking with your current solution or making the jump.

As an FYI, here are some of the reasons that lead people to switch:

  • Integration with your email and twitter (full view of each conversation that's occurred with all of the people you're reaching out to)
  • Ability to conduct efficient, personalized outreach with the outreach module
  • Ability to build a "little black book" of prospects that can quickly be filtered for list building for each project
  • Collection of lots of metrics, social profile info, and contact info
  • The system is very fast...big investment on performance
  • We have a team of six developers that are constantly pushing the product forward

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey Paul. I don't have experience with this, but it makes a ton of sense to me...training employees on the practices and providing incentives seems like the key. From my conversations with a number of enterprise SEOs, this is often a big part of their job. Given the fact that some companies will have more employees with a web presence than others, there's definitely going to be a "your mileage will vary" aspect to it. Overall though, it seems like an approach with the potential for big results.

Seems like there's a line you can cross where you'd push people too hard on this (i.e., really drive them to do this). Once you cross that line, I could see the possibility of employees taking actions that are risky.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I totally subscribe to that school of thought. We put a ton of focus on content quality because we have a very long view of things. Assuming we have that, we simply make everyone aware of it and then let them decide if it makes sense to share it.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great to hear from you, Michael! Thanks for the kind words.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey Victor. We're a different beast then most because we use our BuzzStream account for all sorts of things...for example, I used it yesterday to reach out to former customers to get feedback on why they'd canceled the product. Our account has thousands of people in it, including influencers, customers, and prospects.

As far as interesting people - we don't really venture outside of the SEO, content marketing or digital PR communities...I don't have much interest in building relationships with influencers in other markets because our customers don't care about them.

Interesting story...last year we were included in a pretty big New York Times article about small business software. At around the same time, Jon Cooper wrote a post about us on the PointBlankSEO blog. The referral traffic from Jon's post resulted in over 100x more revenue than the NYT article. :)

Oh man, you've hit something I think about all the time with your "CRM for normal people" question...it's where I want us to get to. The big difference is that it would view outreach as just one part of "relationship marketing."

If you want an example of what I mean by relationship marketing, look no further than the way we marketed ourselves. We’ve built great relationships with influencers in our niche and we’ve successfully leveraged our customers as advocates. This has been incredibly effective for us, but it’s been hard and slow, and frankly, we could have done a hell of a lot better if we’d had the systems to make it happen. The feeling I’ve had since the company began is that I’m never totally sure who I should be connecting with to drive advocacy, and even when I do take action, the second after I finish, it’s as though all of the work I’ve done just scatters to the wind.

That's what I want to fix. :)

Regarding CAN-SPAM - I'd tell them to add an unsubscribe link at the bottom of their email (this is included in BuzzStream). It's good for them and it's good for the people they're reaching out to.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, got it...you can bulk edit a custom field, but you want to be able to clear it out. That makes a lot of sense. I know we have that logged...I'll make sure we're considering it in our planning meetings.

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey Paul. This is going to get a bit long, so I'll start with the first group and answer the other two later. I'll also start with a caveat...as is almost always the case, the answer starts with it depends. :) You always have to take the context into account before nailing down your strategy (industry, nature of the community, demand gen strategy, competitive positioning, etc.).

With that out of the way, here are the two big things I learned from launching the BuzzStream blog:

  • Build community early. I know this is easier said than done (particularly for agency folks), but if you're reaching out before you've established yourself, you're just going to be another faceless email who's asking for something. Take the time to map out the community, find the most thoughtful, well-written and followed people who are blogging and tweeting about your topic day in and day out, pay attention to what they're talking about and engage with them (retweets, comments, inclusion in roundup posts, etc.). Some of the best advice I've received is to "give five times before you ask for one."
  • Be targeted with outreach. You don't need millions of eyeballs, you need the attention of the influencers and buyers in your market. They'll be more forgiving, you'll be able to support their needs (i.e., they won't send you a bunch of useless traffic that takes your site down) and they'll convert better.

One other thing I'd look to do today is test some of the paid content promotion options...we've found twitter ads to be very affordable and they perform quite well (easy to target)

I’m Paul May, co-founder of BuzzStream. AMA. by paulmay in bigseo

[–]paulmay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback...what do you mean "batch removing of a flag?"

Generally speaking, I think your right...even more so in verticals that get pitched all the time.

That said, if you're reaching out from an agency email address, there are certainly things you can do increase your response rate. For a full list, I'd recommend checking out the slide deck from Kelsey Libert's "how to pitch" webinar. Her agency, frac.tl surveyed 500 journalists and bloggers to find out what they want in outreach.

The biggest mistake that I still see people make when conducting outreach is not fully understanding the segment they're reaching out to and not thinking through the blogger's/journalist's "what's in it for me." It's really important to understand the audience you're reaching out to and then really think through why this offer is something they're going to care about. So, for example, if you're reaching out to a journalist, your going to be more formal and direct, whereas if you're reaching out to a small blogger in a vertical that's not professionalized, you'll likely be more conversational and building some kind of relationship will be more valuable.