Farzad Rashidi | Respona
How does a website get more than 3 million visits per month with zero dollars spent on paid advertising?
For Visme, it was all about an on- and off-page SEO strategy focused on creating great content for relevant keywords and then investing time in promoting the content and building up quality backlinks.
The strategy worked so well that they developed a SaaS tool to manage it, and now that tool - Respona - is available for anyone to use.
Farzad Rashidi is the marketer behind the strategy, and in this episode he makes the case for why marketers should be spending more time on content promotion than they are on content creation. He also breaks down the exact process that both Visme and Respona use to get backlinks, and shares what other marketers can do to replicate his results.
Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.
Resources from this episode:
Visit Respona’s website
Download Visme’s Marketing Playbook
Connect with Farzad on LinkedIn
Farzad and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Farzad Rashidi who is the lead innovator at Respona. Welcome to the podcast Farzad.
Farzad (00:26):
Thanks for havinng me on the show Kathleen. I'm very excited.
Kathleen (00:30):
I'm excited to have you here and you're right around the corner from me. It's like we're neighbors. Only it took getting on a virtual podcast to meet. So <laugh> yeah, I'm excited to chat with you. We're gonna talk a little bit about growing organic traffic and some successes you've had in that department. But let's start with a little background. Can you tell my audience who you are, what you do and, and how you, how you came to be doing what you're doing now?
Farzad (00:54):
Sure thing. That is a great question. So just to kind of give you a little background, I started my career in marketing at our parent company called Visme. Have you heard of Visme before Kathleen?
Kathleen (01:05):
I have. Yes.
Farzad (01:06):
Awesome, awesome. Awesome. So for, for folks who are listening, who don't know what Visme is? Wow, I'm, <laugh> heartbroken. <Laugh>
Farzad (01:14):
Just kidding. But we, we are an all in one visual content creation tool for businesses. So if you're a business you're creating reports, proposals, any sort of visual content, Visme sort of helps to create an on brand content very quickly. And I joined a company back in the day when it was a tiny little startup and we were completely bootstrapped, never raised any outside funding, still bootstraped up to this day. And so we were quite glad to figure out a marketing acquisition channel where we'd be able to sort of basically get a consistent flow of incoming traffic and customers to our to our company without having to pay or basically pour all our cash into paid advertising. So what we did basically was to rely on SEO to basically skyrocket the growth of the companies. So right now we are, just to give you the sense of scale.
Farzad (02:04):
We're close to a hundred employees, fully profitable, never raised any outside funding and Vime's website is getting close to about 3 million in monthly organic traffic. And the journey though was a little easier said than done. So what I'm, what I'm summarizing here is years of failures and, and, and back and forth in trial and error. And, but, but the real key factor that sort of helped us basically boost our organic traffic, be able to make that a reliable channel was taking the opposite approach to content creation and promotion and where we basically would spend 20% of our marketing resources on content creation. The other 80% would go into building relationships with publications in our space and the promotion aspect. And that's, what's really been putting us on the map and and also making us very hard to be just maths of mediums. Now that alone was done manually. So at the beginning, we were basically trying to stay scrappy and we were duct taping a bunch of different tools together and, and try to you know, find the right person, get the contacts, reach out, personalize the emails, and also experiment with different strategies. And the, the whole process was sort of was very inefficient and tedious. So we built, we put together basically all of that process under one roof and we built our own internal software. It was kind of, sort of our secret sauce.
Kathleen (03:29):
<Laugh> and
Farzad (03:30):
It just worked ridiculously well. And we decided to release it as a standalone tool for other B2B marketers to use in order to use it for link building, for content promotion to improve their SEO and, and also their organic traffic. So that's sort of the backstory of how Respona was born as a separate product out of Visme.
Kathleen (03:49):
So, so going back to the organic traffic growth, cuz I feel like that's where the story begins. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it sounds like a, a, a very large part of your strategy. And what made made you successful was effectively back links. Is that accurate?
Farzad (04:05):
That's right. Mm-Hmm
Kathleen (04:06):
<Affirmative> so was there also an SEO strategy underpinning that?
Farzad (04:10):
Of course, absolutely. So I always say this, that, that SEO is, is a puzzle, so you can't really make it work without one part. So there's two sides to coin Kathleen, you know, this in and out. So we have on page SEO, which is basically the foundation of your website. So that's your site structure, it's the content you have your website, the landing pages you've built. And then the other side of coin is off page SEO where now that you've built the foundation and now let's try to get some eyeballs on it. So that's where the promotion aspect comes into play. A lot of companies though, unfortunately spend all of the resources on building that foundation, neglecting the promotion aspect, and that's why to get zero traffic. It's just because they haven't really focused as much as they should on the promotion aspect. So I'm happy to touch on both and start maybe on some basics of that, what, what I would recommend for on page stuff. And then we can start progress into talking about how we're gonna actually promote this piece of content and, and web pages that we created.
Kathleen (05:10):
Yeah. I mean, in terms of on page, I would say probably most of my listeners are pretty well versed in that. And so perfect. If, unless there's something that you think is really unique or different about how you did it, mm-hmm <affirmative> in which case I wanna dive in. <Laugh> sure. In, unless you have something like that, then I'd say let's go to the back links cuz sure. That's does that make sense? Sounds
Farzad (05:32):
Like fine. All right. Absolutely. I think we can, we can just leave as far as the on page stuff goes, let's leave it with just one thing and ask as a process that we built for keyword prioritization. So that, that's a big mistake. I see a lot of co corporations, especially bigger companies make is where they're like, Hey, that's great. We, we know that we need to invest in SEO and we need to write content on our blog. So let's go ahead and start writing about topics that we think are relevant and that's mistake number one is that you should almost have no say <laugh>, it's a very scientific process of figuring out exactly what to write or at least ask what we've done and it's what, what, what has worked in the past. So what that's step one is that all stuff that I'm gonna talk about is gonna be relevant if you don't have the basics.
Farzad (06:18):
Right. So one thing I would highly recommend people to do is is going through this process that I'm gonna explain where you wanna find first is what I call opportunity keywords, where these are keywords that have the highest amount of volume possible and lowest amount of competition possible and highest commercial intent for your business. It needs to hit all three bases. Otherwise it's a waste of time for you to invest in, in writing content. And a way we do this is by using three metrics for each one of these keywords. And that is the number of clicks that you keyword gets per month. And also the, the metric called keyword difficulty that basically determines the competitiveness for that keyword and also the cost for click of that keyword, which we use as an indication for commercial intent. Now you're popping into this formula call.
Farzad (07:07):
I talk about this in more depth in a little ebook I wrote. And folks, if they wanna look it up its free, it's just called Visme Marketing Strategy. If you wanna Google that. And I sort of go step by step exactly how you go about running a parent keyword, getting a bunch of search suggestions, and then now run it through this formula to make sure you prioritize the keywords first. And then once you get to that point where you're like, okay, here's the keyword. And you understand the user intent for that keyword. So if it's an informational keyword, you wanna start writing blog posts. If, if it's bottom of the funnel, you wanna create a sales page. That's where your work starts. And that's sort of where the off page SEO sort of kicks in. Is that okay now that we hit publish our job's done as marketers normally <laugh>, and that's just simple and not the case because that's because when, when you are targeting any keyword what I would recommend folks is that you should definitely go and Google that keyword and take a look at the number of webpages that come up.
Farzad (08:06):
For our industry the numbers are in the billions. So if I'm looking up, for example, the keyword, I actually let's do this Kathleen. If you can you do me a favor, just open up a browser, a web page of your browser. So your existing history would an impact the search results. Just go in, look up a keyword like presentation software, which is one of Visme's main keywords.
Farzad (08:29):
Let's see, see how many searches results Google has to go through in order to prioritize these webpages
Kathleen (08:36):
Presentation software. I'm doing it right now.
Farzad (08:40):
Sure.
Kathleen (08:42):
Let's see. Lots of ads <laugh> at the job, right?
Farzad (08:45):
Of course at the very top, how many search results that has Google gone through it? So you see there's a number says, found like X number results in point something seconds. On the very top, right?
Kathleen (08:57):
I'll see. I don't see that anywhere in my Google. It's a lot. I mean, it's a lot of pages though. Cause I'm looking
Farzad (09:04):
Scroll the last time I looked, it was about four and a half billion. Would a be.
Kathleen (09:08):
Yeah. I mean, and it's many, many, many pages that's
Farzad (09:12):
Right. And and, and it, normally people ignore all the ads and what are you seeing? The organic results. Is Visme up there? We should be up there.
Kathleen (09:20):
Let's see. Yeah. You're number one.
Farzad (09:22):
Ah, perfect. Awesome. Well, that's lucky. It fluctuates obviously, but yeah. As long as we're in the top three, so what,
Kathleen (09:29):
And I am in incognito mode by the way. So perfect.
Farzad (09:31):
Awesome. It is something that is a top of the, so what you see now is the tip of the iceberg. So what we, what you don't see is the amount of work you got there to put it a point because when you create what we call quality content, quote, unquote, as content, marketers, always apps. That's not the goal, that's the requirement. So that is like, that's the bare minimum you can do because even if you are creating a piece of content that is in the top 1%, when there is 4 billion search results. Now, if you're Google and your content is on the top 1%, you're still in the millions. When it comes to search rankings, 99% of the clicks go into top 10 search results. So how in the world, you gonna get that page that you created, that you spend so much time on get up in the search roles. So that's, what's sort of is a wake up call to a lot of marketers who are listening to this that are just pumping out content, is that slow down. <Laugh>, let's try to see if we can get this content piece that you spent a ton of time creating up in the search results. Do that first, then move on to the next one. And if you don't have the resources for it, don't produce so much content, start, start with decent frequency and start more focusing more on, on promotion.
Kathleen (10:46):
So I wanna go back to one thing you said mm-hmm <affirmative> and I'm gonna play devil's advocate a little bit sure. Which is that when you have to focus on certain priority keywords and I agree with that and, and I, we always talk about it on my team as kind of your pillar content mm-hmm <affirmative> you know, you pick your few things that you absolutely wanna get found for and you create something super long form, like in your case, the present, I'm looking at your presentation software page that came up in the search results and it's a very, very, very thorough piece of content. And then you build out your topic cluster around that, and you have your related articles that link back on the site. But you said one thing, which I wanted to, to just talk about a minute, which is that you wanna find the one that has a lot of volume, lower competitiveness and high intent.
Kathleen (11:33):
And, and I agree in principle with everything about that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but my one butt is I think marketers hear that and they tend to assume that if a keyword, if a good high intent keyword has low volume, that it's not worth focusing on and I've actually found it to be just the opposite, which is that sometimes the highest intent keywords have very low volume. They might also be very low competitive, but because they're so high intent, even if you get just a few, like call it 10 visits a month, they're like the exact perfect 10, right. Me, I found that can still be very worth focusing on it. Absolutely. So I have a feeling that you and I are gonna agree on this, but like I wanted to call it out there because I think a lot of marketers hear that you wanna go for the high volume and then they immediately disregard low volume keyword. That's right. That's even if they're like really, really good fits in high intent. So that's
Farzad (12:28):
Right. Kathleen, I agree. I couldn't agree with you more. And that's why volume is one out of three metrics in that formula that I described. So if you, if it's really high intent, then other advertisers are betting on that keyword. So you bet that cost per click is gonna be high. So that's, what's gonna push down
Kathleen (12:44):
Maybe, maybe not though. So like, I'll give you an example. I, I used to work in cybersecurity and mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's this, all this changes by industry. And we, we sold something where like one contract cuz we were selling to the government, one contract could be worth like 30 million, you know what I mean? And so it's different than selling like a SaaS subscription that might start at $50 a month. Right. And so, but it was a niche product. And so we had this mm-hmm <affirmative> this one keyword phrase that was super niche that anybody searching, it was an exact right fit for our product. And literally nobody was bidding on it. It was the craziest thing. Right. But because one contract we're 30 million. If we got like three good leads a month,
Farzad (13:28):
That's right. It was. What you're describing is a unicorn. So what we are talking here is rules, rules of thumb and, and a framework. And we can sit down and, and come up with as many exceptions every day.
Kathleen (13:41):
My point is I just don't want people to be, to discount those opportunities because I of course like what you're saying is 100% true, but I feel like they also need to remember that sometimes those other, those opportunities come up where the volume's low, but it's still a really good opportunity.
Farzad (13:57):
Absolutely volume is one out of three metrics. Yeah. We actually don't regard that as the number one metric and that's why we have those other two metrics built into that formula to give us a framework. Now you come across keywords, as you mentioned, some unicorn keywords that is underserved in the search results and also is low in competitiveness and gets a certain number of volume that people are actually searching for at least 10 <laugh> people searching for.
Kathleen (14:23):
I mean the volume was so low. It was like not even measurable in Google. That's we were like, we're doing this cuz it's so good. But anyway, I don't wanna dwell.
Farzad (14:30):
But 99.9, 9% of cases, that's not gonna happen. Because there's millions of marketers hungry for these keywords and they're doing everything they can. It's a war zone out there.
Kathleen (14:42):
Well, it's certainly so like it's interesting, it's certainly a war zone when you're marketing to marketers, mm-hmm <affirmative> which, which you're doing and which I'm doing that's that's right. But it's when you get out of marketing to marketers that I think you see more of the opportunities that I'm describing.
Kathleen (14:55):
Because the marketers in those industries aren't always the most sophisticated.
Kathleen (15:00):
And I hate to say that, but like there are a lot of traditional more traditional industries where there's a ton of opportunity because they're doing marketing in a very traditional way.
Farzad (15:08):
Absolutely I'm with you anyway. I'm certainly biased because I've only been in like super competitive markets. And right now
Kathleen (15:17):
This is why I love interviewing you because its the marketers who market to marketers who have to, in order to survive, really stay on the cutting edge because it is like, it is a total cutthroat universe. So exactly. So let's shift back to back links because this is an interesting area. Yeah.
Farzad (15:35):
Absolutely.
Kathleen (15:36):
So I wanna just kind of frame this, this discussion because I think probably everybody listening is familiar with the concept of backlinks. They understand why you have to do it, but the big, but being as marketers also, we've all been on the receiving end of what can feel like very spammy backlink request campaigns. And I get a ton of them emails like, Hey, would you please add a link to this, to your blah, blah, blah. And I basically delete most of those emails. And so mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I totally believe in going after back links, but I've just never either experienced or participated in a process that I felt like was effective and wasn't annoying. And so I wanna hear more about how you did that's cuz it was obviously successful. So let's, let's break it down with that kind of as the table setting.
Farzad (16:26):
Sure, absolutely. So first of all, I'm going to object to what you just mentioned, that you've never been receptive to a successful backlink pitch because guess what, Kathleen, you are doing this right now. So we, you are going to give us a back link to responder. So there you goes. That's the successful partnership right there. <Laugh> yep. So, and that's, that's exactly what I'm going to preach is that I, I always get this question, especially when we're go on other people's podcasts. Like, Hey, nobody wants to do back links cuz back links are spammy. Right. And the way I think about it is that since it's so new, a lot of marketers don't really know how to, what to do with it really, because it reminds me of back in the day, when, when you would think of sales emails, everybody would like send out like 10,000 emails like this newsletter type emails to everyone <laugh> and use the work back in the day.
Farzad (17:15):
But then as marketers and salespeople become more sophisticated and become more educated, then those started fading away. Right? So you don't really see some of those spammy sales emails anymore and, and the sales people who are actually intentional and they, they know your last vacation dates and <laugh> that reach chat to you and, and, and, and capture attention. So same things happening, the SEO industry, we're just a little behind on the sales aspect. So since marketers just started doing this, unfortunately there's a lot of malpractice just because people haven't really been able to kind of grasp and, and understand what exactly works. And so they resort to spamming and they're like, okay, let's, let's shoot this out and see what happens and answer nothing's gonna happen if you're just spamming everyone. Right. Right.
Kathleen (18:09):
Why would I take time out of my day to like dig out that old blog that you want me to link to you in and go back and edit it and put a link to your thing. Like I'm not gonna spend time on that. Like what's in it for me is the big question, right?
Farzad (18:23):
Exactly. You, you nailed it. Absolutely. So here here's, we we've, again, just like anything we like to have a framework, run, everything that we do so that we, we take a systematic approach where we can replicate things and scale things. And, and both of the companies that we have Respona and Visme, and, and the process that we have for link building, let me, I, I hate the term because it's been there's so much negative connotation around it. And, and, and, and people associated with spamming the world link building is building relationships or relevant publications in your space in multi-channel. And it doesn't even have to be all through blocks. One really good link building strategy is what I'm doing right now. I am getting a back link from Kathleen Booth. So let me explain. So there's a variety of different link building strategies that starts with a partnership.
Farzad (19:16):
So you normally start with a, a transactional collaboration, and then you move that, nurture that relationship forward. And it's gonna sound very tedious and very time consuming. Hence why a respondent was born as a product to solve that problem. But, but let me explain the basics so that we know exactly what are the type of strategies, cuz we all know we need back links, as you mentioned, let me introduce some ways on how we can get it. So one of the simplest outreach strategies, especially if you're a thought leader in your space or at least, or good at one thing, which most people are they're normally very concentrated on a certain topic. They feel comfortable talking about, go on as a guest on other people's podcast. That's a great way to meet awesome hosts like yourself. And also at the same time they chop those interviews into I would say blog articles and normally get a back and grip to your website. You also have a free advertising to a niche audience, right? And that's how you be able to gain some brand awareness. And, and I can start talking day and night about how good it is to go on podcasts. That's why I do it three to four times a week.
Kathleen (20:21):
You do not have to convince me by the way, because yeah, exactly. At, at my last. So I have, you know, obviously I have this podcast and I get pitched a lot by podcast booking agents. And so at my last three companies I've hired pod and I talk about this on LinkedIn all the time. I've hired podcast booking agents to get me on other people's podcasts for exactly this it's not even just for the backlink it's for the brand exposure, et cetera. And it's so affordable. Right? I, I I'm shocked that not every single marketer does this. Yeah. Like to me it is obvious and effective and you know, it's like low hanging fruit. So <laugh>, I you're, you're preaching to the choir.
Farzad (20:58):
<Laugh> exactly. And, and I'd love to start with some of these low hanging fruit and then we can work our way into some more advanced techniques, which you're, you're like, okay, I'll put together a blog post. How does that have to do with podcast? We're we're trying to get some basic basics done and then we can get into some of the more advanced things. I'm not sure what he knows actually, but based on the provider we're using your, your podcast and Inbound Success is actually ranked in the top 2% global rank. So I'm not surprised you get,
Kathleen (21:25):
I didn't know that, but that's very cool to hear. I'm so bad. I'll be honest. I track nothing. I track nothing. <Laugh> I, I don't like, I just, I've been doing this for so long and I love to do it and I learn so much. But I, I have zero tracking in place, which is maybe that's terrible, but
Farzad (21:42):
Whatever you're doing is working.
Kathleen (21:44):
It must be why I get pitched a lot. So there you go.
Farzad (21:46):
Exactly. So your podcast is awesome. And, and so how did we get this interview? Let me explain the process. How, how I landed this interview. All right. I feel like that that would sort of explain a lot. So what our team does, one of our marketing team members name is Dylan. Shout out to Dylan. Thank you, Dylan. <Laugh> he runs a search through Respona. And again, you don't have to do a lot of these stuff that I'm gonna talk about through responder. You can do it or yourself manually. Respona is just here to save you time and scale. If you're just starting out, don't pay for all loose things to dos, you can do a lot of replicated yourself manually. So he goes through, Respona runs a podcast episode search and finds someone in our space. Who's actually goes on podcasts a lot.
Farzad (22:29):
So somebody else is the SaaS founder in the SEO space, right? Say that's me. So you can look up my name and it will pull up all that episodes that, that person's been a guest on within the past like year or so. So what that tells you is automatically three things about these podcasts. One, these podcasts accept guests, cuz not all podcasts do. Two they're relevant to your space because they've obviously interviewed someone in your space and also make your life easy when it comes to pitching. Because then you can use that episode as a hook to personalize that pitch. Now I can reach out to Kathleen and say, Hey, Kathleen loved the interview that you just did with Farzad and, and, and link building strategies. And by the way, I I'm this and who this and that at this company. And, and love to hop and show talk about X, Y, Z.
Farzad (23:15):
Now I can assume that this is one of the top pitches because I'm sure you're getting bombarded by these spammy <laugh> podcast page. Like, hi, this is our one page. Can you have us on the show? Yeah. So having that personal approach when it comes to your average and actually having a strategy built in just to apply to the host, Hey, this is not an auto mass email. We sent out to everyone. We sat down, done our research. We understand that we could actually provide some value to your audience and hence why we're <inaudible> come on the show. So that's one out of a gazillion different strategies I recommend people to experiment with. So that's what we call the podcast strategy.
Kathleen (23:53):
Right? Yeah. And I mean, I love that. And I think that that is super effective because like, going back to my initial question though, what's in it for me, like what's in it for me in this case is if I get pitched, it's less work I have to do to find a guest and that's right. I mean, a lot of my guests come to me through pitches others. There's just people I wanna interview. And so I reach out to them, but mm-hmm <affirmative> but yeah, you ha there, it has to be reciprocal. Right? Exactly. So that's that? I do like the podcast approach a lot for that reason. Absolutely. What else you got?
Farzad (24:22):
But hopefully you don't feel like I'm just here for, for a the link strategy just as no, no. Right. I, I, I would like to be respectful of my time and our time. So we only are very selected on the podcast, but
Kathleen (24:35):
I love your transparency
Farzad (24:36):
Top of the list.
Kathleen (24:38):
I love the transparency. And I think that that's like, look, we're all doing these things for a reason. Right. That's right. We're marketers. We understand them.
Farzad (24:44):
Exactly. Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah, absolutely. All right. So let's get a little more sophisticated let's now let's get into some more advanced stuff, see what we can do. So I'd like to always start with an example, so we can actually walk through a so we're not just talking the theory. So let's say we put together a guide on B2B inbound marketing, or let's say that's the target keyword that we're going after. All right. Obviously it's a very competitive keyword. So unless you have a very high authority site, obviously shouldn't have gone through that process in the first place. Right? So you wanna be careful about the keywords you're picking, cuz then that determines the rest of the strategy. So, so we got a keyword on B2B content marketing or B2B and inbound marketing, one of the first strategies that we do.
Farzad (25:33):
So normally we, we have a three step process in link building. Step one is a, is a transactional collaboration where you are reaching out to someone. You're like, Hey, you don't know us, but I'm happy to do this for you. If you do this for me. And then that translates into a more serious partnership where we call a content, a content collaboration, which normally is us publishing a post on your website as a second step, not as a first step, which is a big mistake. A lot of people make. And the third step is an actual partnership where we actually partner with relevant publication websites or in our space that publish content on people's website. So let's walk through example. So step one, which is a transactional collaboration. Normally we follow, I would say four or five different strategies. The two simplest ones that I like is number one is the competitor backlink strategy.
Farzad (26:22):
And by the way, all of this stuff I'm gonna talk about. I know it's hard to keep track on a podcast cuz audio only, and I can't share my screen and walk you through it. So we actually have a free, ungated open average strategy guide on the Respona website. So if you go to Respona.com, R E S P O N A dot com, the very bottom of the page, we've got an outreach strategy hub. So all of these strategies, I'm gonna walk you through has recipes and templates built attached, you know, so we segment that based on the strategy. So you can just follow through and you don't need to use our tools. You can, you start doing a lot of it yourself manually. Awesome. So what, yeah, absolutely. So first things is competitor backlink analysis. So if you've actually gone through the content creation process, right, and you've created the content that's truly better and you actually add value compared to the rest of the search results in the top 10.
Farzad (27:11):
And one thing you could do is just start with for example or, or let me rephrase that. Let, let's take it a step for before we can get to the competitor backlinks is let's start with the anchor text strategy. If the editors listening to this, let's start from here. <Laugh> if you're not that's okay. So the, the, one of the simplest strategies you can start with when it comes to transactional collaborations, the anchor text strategy, and that is basically finding out what are some of the non-competing articles in your space that I've mentioned your target keyword in the body, but the overall core topic got out page is about talking about something else. Like for example, let's say somebody's talking about Hey how Ahrefs gets over 2 million a month, organic traffic and as part. So the core topic of that page is about Ahrefs and what they're doing the body of the page and mention that yes, Ahrefs, one of the great examples of B2B inbound marketing, because it did this and that.
Farzad (28:10):
And then it starts breakdown. Now since the overall topic is something else, it makes a perfect place for you to place your content in there. Because what we wanna do is to reach out to whoever's the right person at that publication. It could be the writer only if they work there, if not finding someone who's actually in charge of the editorial, which takes a lot of time. That's why Respona automates a lot of stuff, but, but you can do it yourself manually by going through LinkedIn, finding that person and reach out to them. Now here's how the pitch goes, Hey Kathleen, I'm writing an article for Crazy Egg that's about to get published next week. And I would love to reference your guide on influencer marketing on the post that I'm writing. And I was just wondering what would be one of your top posts about influencer marketing that you'd like me to reference?
Farzad (29:02):
And by the way, I noticed that I came across your guide on Ahrefs and noticed that you guys talked about X, Y, and Z, and noticed you guys referenced B2B inbound marketing in there. Our team actually put together a really comprehensive guide that I think would make a nice addition. I really appreciate if you'd be able to collaborate on this and if you like the content, we can, we can collaborate on that front. So we start with the give and continue on with the ask. Now here's a very key aspect that's gonna make or break your campaign and that's staying within your league. What that means is if you just started a blog today, don't go and reach out to,
Kathleen (29:41):
I was just gonna ask you this. It's like, if you don't have good domain authority being like, Hey, we'll link to you on our blog. Somebody's gonna be like, well, okay. The tree that fell in the forest and nobody heard you.
Farzad (29:52):
Know exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So first nobody wants to link to a website as of low, lower domain authority. And also nobody wants to work with them in the first place. So what you wanna do is to stay within 10 to 20 in terms of your domain range. So you don't wanna go too low because you don't wanna work with websites that aren't gonna help you move the needle. And also at the same time, you don't wanna shoot too high for the stars just simply because those people wouldn't be interested in working with you. So what happens that once you stay within your league, you work with websites that you can actually provide valuable. You know I would say incentives to then over time, your domain rating starts growing. Then that's how you sort of now we go to HubSpot and collaborate with them because we're domain rating of like 77 now.
Farzad (30:34):
Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> so Respona has like about a hundred K monthly traffic now. And Visme we can pretty much work with everyone at this point because we've worked out way up there, right? Didn't get here overnight. So staying with your league, working with websites that are within your range, and more importantly, starting with a gift here, here's what I can offer you and continue on with a relevant ask. That's personalized to that person. You're not just sending out the same pitch to everyone. And that goes a long way in getting more replies. And matter of fact is though not everybody's gonna say yes to that, even though that's a pretty solid pitch, five to 10% are going to say yes, and that for us is gold. <Laugh>, we're happy with it. Reason being is we're not just happy with that five to 10% because a lot of people are listening.
Farzad (31:24):
They're like, okay, that was a lot of work to find Kathleen, get her email, reach out to her, personalize the pitch, you know, they gonna ask for what, for one backlink out of a hundred people I reached out to. So that's what are two steps steps, two and three, right? So let's nurture that relationship. See how we can work together later. Okay. So let's say your content manager replies back, say, Hey yeah, absolutely love to get reference. Here's our guide influencer marketing. You can publish in your guest blog on Crazy Egg, which is a relevant website in your space that also is of similar or higher domain rating. And yes, actually, I, I, I reviewed your content, looked solid. I went ahead and referenced it in our guide to Ahrefs or whatever other article that you, that we pitched you. So once that collaboration happens, it it's your foot in the door.
Farzad (32:15):
<Laugh> now you got a buddy, right? So now you got a person that you already collaborated with that is in fact in charge of their editorial, right? So now they have decision making power in terms of deciding what goes on a website. It doesn't. And I also, you've already reciprocated a favor to them. So that is gold. And that's what a lot of content marketers again, drop out is that they're like, okay, great. We gotta link. And then they're, they're like, they're gone. And that is for us. Step one. <Laugh> now let's see how else we can work together. So Kathleen, then the second step, or the second thing we do is that we actually run that domain through Ahrefs whatever. Like for example, if you're working with Tradeswell we run it through Ahrefs or whatever tools are you guys using for SEO, whoever's listening.
Farzad (33:05):
We give you a bunch of, there are competing, competing websites that they compete with on an organic level. Like I see here, for example, Swell is and Brewers Hill not sure what are are any relevant, but there, there are websites that are actually in your space, e-commerce brands right. Or e-commerce marketing brands that are in your space. We're run it through what we call a content gap analysis, where basically it's a very simple feature that tells you, Hey, here's the keywords that their competitors are ranking for, but these guys aren't. So what we do then is that we grab a little screenshot of that, be like, Hey, thank you so much, Kathleen, for adding that link, I went ahead and referenced you on Crazy Egg. And by the way, I noticed that both of your competitors like Swell and X, Y, and Z are both ranking for this keyword, for example, podcast marketing. And you guys aren't. And I actually happen to have a writer in our marketing team who does all of our podcast outreach and would be able to cover that keyword for you. What would you say now? <Laugh> we already have a foot in the door, 90% say yes to that because you.
Kathleen (34:07):
So you're basically offering to guest write an article for them to be published on their site.
Farzad (34:10):
Exactly. Okay. And that's step two, that leads me to step three. So if you're playing your cards, right. Especially working with websites, that also, so that's, that's the third question that we ask is like, Hey Catherine, do you happen to contribute to other people's websites or other people's publications? Good amounts say, yes, if you're in a marketing space, if you're in a smaller niche or different niches that normally are harder to get. But if the answer to that is yes. So then we say, okay, why don't we partner up together? So anytime you're writing or contributing articles to other people's websites, if it would make sense to the context of that article, it can reference one of Respona's articles we're publishing right. Regularly articles. And we have over a hundred and we do the same for you. And we put together a little sheet and if so, we make sure everything's fair and square.
Farzad (34:59):
So as you, you know, reference Responda we do the same for you. Hmm. So now what happens next time you're publishing it. So what happens over time is that you build a network of like a dozen of these partners, like 12 of these partners, you don't need a million. And out of those 12 half are gonna be inactive. They're not good partners. They're either not reciprocated or not responsive cut 'em out. So over time, after a few months, you can end up with a list of like five really good partners. <Laugh> are regularly contributing to other sites, regularly, reciprocating and very responsible. Now what happens is next time you're producing a content for another website. Not only referencing yourself, if they allow you, but you are more importantly referencing all your partners and that gas stuff. So what happens that creates a ripple effect that indirectly results in five or six other back links to your website from five or six different domains that makes it all worthwhile to go through the whole flow. Because now each new relationship you bring is, is a potential guest force is a potential partner. So going through that cycle of building relationships with publications in your space is what makes the whole flow. So right now we have one person a respond. We are very small team. One person manages the entire content strategy and link building. And that person single handedly builds close to about a hundred qualified media mentions every single month, month over month.
Kathleen (36:26):
How much, how much is that? Is that person also doing the writing?
Farzad (36:30):
He does write the guest post, but he doesn't write the content for our blog, cuz that's very time consuming. That's a full time job.
Kathleen (36:37):
So yeah, I was gonna say like, how is he doing all that. Is, is he superhuman? And can I steal him? <Laugh>
Farzad (36:41):
No. Well, the thing is he uses Respona. That's a superhuman ability. So what Respona does again, I don't mean to plug out too, too much here, but it basically brings the whole flow of, Hey, here are the right websites we need to reach out to and it will automatically go and find the right people and get the contacts and verifies the emails for you. And then, so you don't actually have to spend any time on the prospecting aspect, what you would need to spend your time on is a personalization. So we actually in the last step, we're like, okay, now act let's personalize. The emails, not just rely on variables. So the variables do their job. Now let's make sure we grab some snippets from the article they can sprinkle in. Let's make sure we connect with that person on LinkedIn. So that that's where you spend most of your time within our platform is actually personalized and building relationships. Instead of you doing all the door to work of connecting the dots, to get it asked what the machine is for.
Kathleen (37:31):
That makes sense. No, that's great. All right. I wanna shift over, cause this is super interesting and I wanna talk about results. So you did this at Visme and you're doing it at Respona. Now, can you talk about like, I feel like if somebody's listening their questions gonna be like you know how quickly you should expect to see results and how, you know, what does that look like if I'm really doing this correctly? Right?
Farzad (37:51):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so, you know, <laugh>, you know, I, I get this question quite often. I always ask. And I was like, if I, if I tell you that I'm working out, how long would it take for them to get results? Well, depends on how hard you're working out. What are you eating? Who's your trainer? Where do what type of work at you do? So it's so many variables. Nobody can say, yeah, you started working out great in three months, you're gonna be buff. Nobody can say that just because there's so many moving factors and you have to hit all the bases right. For it to work. But as a matter of fact is, it's a good thing that is difficult to do. I'm not here saying that, Hey, these are all very easy. You can do that in a click of a button. Cuz if that was the case, it would no longer be a competitive advantage. So say if you create a better tool to mime today, and it's a better presentation tool, good luck trying to get 3 million traffic. That's our main competitive advantage, not the product is the process. It's the process how we acquire.
Kathleen (38:43):
How often did you guys see results? Cause obviously you're doing it really well, right? Like what is or not, not how often, how long did it take you to get results? Like and what does that look like for Respona? Cuz you're starting now from scratch again.
Farzad (38:56):
Yeah, exactly. So in all it seems like I'm dodging the question, but we, we started our content writing at Respona about two, two and a half years ago, almost around the same time when we started building products. So we even had a blog, a link builder before we had a product. So we knew that from day one, that was gonna be our main acquisition strategy, wanted to invest in an ASAP and, and, and for it to work, it depends on your definition of what do you mean by working? Do you mean any traffic come to your website to what level of traffic? Cause it's on a hockey stick going up. So within the past two years, what we've done. So we're getting close to about 96 K in monthly organic traffic that's a lot and yeah, 95, 90 6% of our leads also come directly from our organic channel.
Farzad (39:39):
So we do very little in paid ads. Actually no paid ads, very little in cool average with specific content marketers that we already collaborate with. And, and we are like, Hey, you want to come use Respona? And that bring some level of demos. But, but all, everybody else comes like I did two demos this morning before our call today. And it's all clear inbound. How did you find us? I did some research. Where did you do your research? Google. All right. Perfect. I'm glad our SEO works. Yeah. So, and it's on a hockey stick going up. So it's not like it's certain date that you're like, okay, now it started working now we're gonna stop investing in.
Kathleen (40:11):
I think directionally you wanna see, you wanna see improvements month over month.
Farzad (40:15):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. And it's gonna happen that flywheel's gonna start turning after a few months, but also it depends on the amount of resource and the amount of time you're putting on it. How how do you allocate? What, what really is important here is not the timeframe. Really. I think it's a matter of allocation resource and make sure you're allocating your resources. Right? And that breakdown, that sweet spot that we found is 20% content creation, 80% promotion. And it doesn't matter how much resources you have as long as you are allocating it correctly. So if you don't have anybody in house, you have one person managing the whole thing. Okay. Let's produce one content piece. Do the research, find the right keywords, write one really good piece every month, spend the rest of the month on promotion and link building. You're done with it.
Farzad (41:01):
Great. Now let's create another one. And so the amount of time it was gonna take is proportionate. The amount of resources you have. Now, if you have a team of a hundred, you can get there a hundred X quick and as long as you're still repeating the same steps. So I think what matters here is if SEO is the right strategy and you know, already that people are actively, if the product or solution you're selling is the type of product that people are aware of the problem. And they're actively searching for solutions. That means SEO's the right strategy. Now, whether or not you should do it. Absolutely. We're almost idiotic not to, but if you're selling a, a, you know, million dollar contract or a very expensive product, maybe at the beginning, your efforts would be well suited to hire salespeople. Or if the sales pro process for that is different, or if you sell t-shirts and hoodies on a commerce store, maybe SEO is not the best channel because it's a very cutthroat, a very competitive industry.
Farzad (41:56):
So maybe you start with some paid ads, get some revenue in the door first, before we start investing in SEO and not to say this is the right strategy for every single business. But in terms of once you have it in your priority list and once you, once you get there the process for that is quite clear and, and, and the amount of resources you put in is proportionate to the amount of results you're getting. So I know I can't put a timeframe on it because obviously any, I can just throw a number out there, but honestly I would just be catching off like, yeah, no, no, that's have no basis.
Kathleen (42:26):
I'm not expecting a timeframe. I think that was helpful. And just kind of hearing, even just with Respona where you are today in terms of your organic traffic, that's really impressive.
Farzad (42:34):
Appreciate that.
Kathleen (42:34):
Very cool. All right. We're coming close to the end of our time. So I wanna switch over and ask you the two questions that I always ask all my guests. First, a lot of marketers I talk to say that they struggle to keep up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing particularly. So how do you personally like to keep educated and stay on top of all of the, the changing dynamics?
Farzad (42:57):
Absolutely. Well, I'm a, I'm a big nerd in the SEO space. I follow Search Engine Journal , and read through some of the updates that are coming, starting out when, like, to educate yourself first, before you get into all the nerd, things that, that are in the industry, I'd recommend to start with two resources. Ahrefs blog put to get a really good quality content, and it's purely educational. And also Backlinko from Brian Dean. It just got bought by. So those two resources are what, what I would recommend starters to, to start with and kind of work our way up to like Search Engine Journal. Just to keep up with the updates with algorithm of Google, with some of the changes that are in the industry.
Kathleen (43:37):
Yeah. Those are good ones. I definitely follow both of those. All right. Second question. You know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing and I always caveat this by saying, I define inbound marketing not in the very traditional old school HubSpot way that they started out with and they've evolved to by the way. But to me, it's anything that naturally attracts the right customer to your business. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. So given that definition, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing today?
Farzad (44:06):
Yes. And, and it may be repetitive. And I think Ahrefs guys have done a phenomenal job. So they're a bootstrapped company, which I very much respect hundred, almost a hundred million in annual rate, current revenue and team of 60.
Kathleen (44:21):
Wow.
Farzad (44:21):
Which is just mindboggling. So, and all comes for the SEO channel and they eat their own dog food with their own product. And they just have a very solid product. We we're their customer as well. So I, I very much have very high respect for them. We're actually working with them with their team closely to have integrations with respondent that connect their accounts. But that is a company I definitely respect because they don't have a whole lot of resources. Yeah. And they've managed to do phenomenal things with, with limited resources.
Kathleen (44:48):
Well, I didn't realize they were only 60 people. So now that I know that that's changed my entire perspective on what they've done and that's amazing. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I have had such, such a great time chatting with you about this. Like I love how detailed you got and how specific that's, what I always enjoy about these conversations is making it really, really actionable. I know I'm gonna check out responder for sure. For my team, cuz I do have a head of content and I think we definitely don't spend enough time promoting our content and we have, she creates amazing content. We just need to get it in front of more people. So for anybody else who's interested in connecting with, you might have a question or wants to learn more about Respona. What is the best way for them to do that?
Farzad (45:28):
Sure. So education material, we put together a lot of unngated free educational materials and that's always, I recommend people to read about these initiatives yourself, start doing it manually. Then once it hits the pivotal point that you're like, I can't hard to scale then comes a no brainer. So Respona's blog I would say is, is a great place to start. Right. And reading about some of the strategies that I've talked about today. But me, myself personally, my name is Farzad. There aren't a whole lot of them out in this world. So I'm very easy to find. I stick out like a sore thumb on LinkedIn. So <laugh> to connect and, and say, hi, love to love to hear from you.
Kathleen (46:06):
Yeah. And I will put links to Respona and to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, which can be found at kathleen-booth.com. So head to the website for that and to connect with Farzad. And if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you'd head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast or review. That is kind of like a back link for me <Laugh> and definitely how other people find the podcast. So now that I know it's in the top 2%, let's get it to the top 1%. Right? absolutely. But, and if you know somebody else doing really great inbound marketing work, tweet me at @Kathleenlbooth and I would love to have them as my next guest on the show or pitch me as you just heard because it does work if you do a good pitch. <Laugh> so thanks for joining me Farzad. This was really interesting.
Farzad (46:50):
Thank you very much. This was fun.
