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[00:01:00]
Joe Casabona: What if I told you the answer to better organic traffic isn’t more content, it’s less content? That’s what today’s guest, Farzad Rashidi, argues. That when it comes to SEO, link building, and organic traffic quality outperforms quantity every time. This cuts against the grain of what I’ve been saying for a long time: be a consistent content creator, or does it? Maybe consistent, quality content is really what you need, not just publishing every week.
But Farzad doesn’t stop there. He provides a process for figuring out what content to write and how to get people to it. I’m just going to tell you upfront that Farzad blew my mind a bunch of times, so much so that I did something I don’t normally do, which is explicitly ask him about his product.
It’s something that full disclosure, he’s given me three free months on so I’m trying it out. I will report the results back to you. But I’m really excited. Farzad does a really good job of explaining what to do. And he also says that the product is not for everybody. It solves a specific pain point, another important lesson that we’ve been getting on the show a lot.
So if you want to check out Farzad and his product Respona and everything that we talked about, you can head over to howibuilt.it/263. You’ll also be able to learn about this week’s sponsors over there: NitroPack, Tailor Brands, and Nexcess. So go ahead over to howibuilt.it/263, say thank you, join the mailing list, do all sorts of fun stuff. But for now, let’s get into the intro and then the interview.
[00:02:41]
Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue, and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.
Real quick, before we get started, I want to tell you about a free weekly newsletter I’m doing called Creator Toolkits. I want you to become a more efficient creator. It’s the whole purpose and mission of this show. I want you to be able to free up more time to create, to get more sales, and to make more money. And you’ll be able to do that with these free weekly tips delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. with the Creator Toolkits newsletter.
As a thank you for signing up, you will get a free content planner that I use personally with YouTube and podcasting. That is built-in Airtable. You’ll get that completely for free if you head over to howibuilt.it/airtable. Become a more efficient creator with free weekly tips delivered directly to your inbox every Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. eastern over at howibuilt.it/airtable.
[00:04:03]
Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. I am here with Farzad Rashidi. He is the lead innovator Respona. I am really excited because he and his team reached out at I think the perfect time. I was starting to look into kind of SEO, doing more keyword research. I just finished a project—Well, my VA did the project—of updating the titles for all of the episodes for this podcast so that they were more descriptive and hopefully more SEO friendly. So it was just really good timing. But enough about all that. Let’s bring Farzad in. Farzad, how are you today?
Farzad Rashidi: Doing wonderful. Thanks for having me on the show, Joe.
Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for coming on the show. Now, I know we talked about this in the pre-show but I am saying your name correctly, right? I want to be very cognizant about that.
Farzad Rashidi: You got it 100% correctly. It’s pronounced Farza. It’s a super Persian name.
Joe Casabona: Awesome.
Farzad Rashidi: I’m Iranian originally.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Awesome. I’ve had people on the show and they’re like, “Yeah, however you say my name is fine.” And I’m like, “A lot of people listen to the show, and I want to make sure that they say your name correctly because I said your name correctly.”
Farzad Rashidi: I appreciate that. Every time I go to Starbucks, I just tell the barista my name is Bob or something. It’s just a lot easier for everybody in that case.
Joe Casabona: It’s funny. Because I think I have a pretty phonetic name, but I still get like Caasabona. Like all the soft. It’s Casabona. It’s a really hard Italian last name. And then there’s the inappropriate spins on that. But that’s not what we’re talking about today.
The topic that we kind of talked about in the pre-show interview was the process for writing content that’s optimized for SEO. But before we dive into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Farzad Rashidi: Of course. So, Joe, just to give you a little background, I started my career as the first marketing hire at Visme. Have you heard of Visme before, Joe?
Joe Casabona: Visme? Are you saying Visme? No, no, I haven’t.
Farzad Rashidi: V-I-S-M-E. That’s right. I’m sure you’ve heard of tools like Canva.
Joe Casabona: Yes, yes.
Farzad Rashidi: All right. Well, Visme is a little more upmarket than that. So we’re predominantly a b2b software, any business from SMB, all the way up to enterprise. And we got some more interactivity features, etc., for creating branded content.
Now, when I joined the company it was a tiny little startup. We were still in beta. And we had to figure out stuff in terms of our customer acquisition. My co-founder at Respona is the founder of Visme and he is a very bootstrap-minded founder and he believes that we should run a company like a business, not like a startup.
So he did not want to live in the Fairyland of, you know, “Let’s go raise a bunch of money and burn a lot of cash and see if we can figure it out.” So we had to be very cost-conscious. We had to quickly figure out a way to bring a consistent flow of users onto our platform without us having to burn a ton of cash, especially in paid advertising, which is a never-ending black hole.
So what we realized was that one of the best ways, and we experimented with everything on the site, but what we soon realized that one of the best ways we could consistently bring in quality leads into our platform and actually potentially get converted into a paying customer was through SEO.
So what we started doing was basically to start producing a lot of content and produce a ton of educational resources. I hope we can definitely dive into some of the details on that. But what we soon realized was that one of the key factors that really helped Visme to sort of get blown out of water… So right now, just to give you a lot of background, Visme is now over 13 million active users, still completely bootstrapped, close to 100 employees, fully profitable. And we’re doubling our user base year over year.
And the way we acquire all of these customers, which is around 20,000, to 25,000 new users every day, without us having to spend much in paid advertising or cold outreach compared to our size, is through our organic traffic, which is now close to two and a half, three million monthly organic visitors to our website that we’re getting for free
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Farzad Rashidi: Which is worth about one and a half million dollars worth of paid advertising. We are bringing the same level of traffic that we’re getting through our organic channels.
Now, the key that got us there and helped us stay over the top, especially in a very busy industry that we were in, which is design was link building an Off-page SEO. So basically getting relevant, authoritative source in our space to start talking about us. And that basically [inaudible 00:09:14] to popularity in Google and other search engines.
Those backlinks really led us to the creation of Respona which was initially created as an internal software for us. It was sort of our secret sauce that helped us sort of skyrocket our traffic. And then we decided to release that as a standalone product. So that’s how I sort of shifted away from Visme. Now I run Respona and started a team and the rest is history.
Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s really interesting. So Respona, is it still kind of part of the Visme fit? Is it like a subsidiary or it’s just its own standalone thing?
Farzad Rashidi: Standalone entity. That’s right. But as I mentioned, the co-founder of Respona is the founder of Visme. So we’re intertwined, but it’s a separate entity.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Wow, that’s really cool. I know dogfooding your own product used to be a very popular thing in like the mid to late 2000s. That’s kind of like falling off a little bit when you really want to solve customer problems. But it sounds like you did both, right? You solved a very real problem that you had and realized that you had a good solution to that problem.
Farzad Rashidi: Absolutely, yes.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. So, first of all, you mentioned that you started to produce a lot of content and educational guidance, stuff like that. I would love to talk to you about that in Build Something More in the member’s episode, if you’re okay with that.
Farzad Rashidi: Sure, of course. Let’s do it.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. So if you listening are not a member, you can head over to howibuilt.it/263. You’ll find all of the show notes as well as a way to join the Creator Crew at just 50 bucks a year. That’s less than five bucks a month. And you’ll get this episode and every episode ad-free extended. It’s great. As well as behind-the-scenes stuff.
But what I really want to talk to you about, and we’ll probably touch on the content stuff a little bit, is kind of writing content that’s optimized for SEO. And then you mentioned link building. So maybe what we could start off with is a… I won’t put a number to it. I was going to say three-pronged approach, but a multi-pronged approach to getting organic traffic. It sounds like you need content, you need backlinks, you need people talking about you. Is there this kind of framework or an approach that you take for that?
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah. I’m happy to shed some light on that a little bit, Joe. So building a website I have always said to our team is kind of like building a house. There are different pieces of the puzzle and you need to have it all together for it to work.
The site’s structure and the content that you have on your website, which that nerdy term for it is on-page SEO, is like the foundation of the house. And a promotion tactics, link building included, is the building that you build on top. Now you can’t do one without another. So the first step is to get your site structure right. And that foundation is basically built on top of first figuring out what terms your potential customers are searching for throughout the customer journey.
So let’s say you sell a service or a product, I’m going to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and think, Okay, I’m actually starting to learn about this topic,” or “now I’m looking actually for different solutions to this problem. Now I’m actually at the point of purchase.”
There are different tiers of web pages that needs to be created for each step. The very top of the funnel normally is blog articles, educational material. The consideration stage normally have some sort of gated content. And last but not least, is sales landing pages.
Once we have these content pieces created, then most people start from there. They’re just slapping a bunch of stuff on their website and they call it a day. They’re like, “Hey, we’re sitting here and over 90-something percent of content on the internet gets zero traffic. It’s just not enough people coming to our website” and just move on and start cold calling and start selling stuff. That’s how most businesses fail. Not that cold calling doesn’t work, it definitely works for some industries. I’m just saying-
Joe Casabona: It’s a grind. You got to do it right. There’s got to be good timing. Right?
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: The cold calling that works is the army of cold callers who eventually kind of… It’s like gambling a little bit, right? You keep playing and eventually you’ll hit.
Farzad Rashidi: I can’t really speak to that much just because I’m not an expert. I’ve never been good at outbound per se myself. My specialty is predominantly inbound and we’re inbound company all throughout. So that’s something that we’ve definitely experimented with before. And something that’s just I’m not good enough at it to be able to speak to it much. But on the inbound side of things, that’s something that’s really worked wonders for us.
So basically, after creating these pieces of content, I got to build that building on top. And that’s sort of where link building comes into play. A lot of people think of link building as spammy emails to get on their inbox. “Hi, I want to publish a guest post on your website.” And that’s just the opposite of exactly what we preach.
What Link building is, is building relationships with relevant authoritative publications in your space in order to get them to talk about you and reference you. And that’s sort of how you can position yourself as an authoritative resource in your industry for your topic. And this is what we call building topical authority. That’s how you’ll be able to sort of get your content to consistently rank for your target keywords.
So at any stage of your journey, people are searching Google for potential [inaudible 00:14:50] then you start showing up. And it’s not just the sales, not just at the top for blog articles. It’s all throughout the buyer’s journey.
Joe Casabona: That makes a lot of sense. Because you’re right, I get those cold emails all the time about, “I’d love to write a blog post” or “maybe you could tell your audience about this.” But like, I mean, they’re terrible. It’ll be like, “Hi, I’m inquiring about putting a link on Joe Casabona.” And I’m like, I don’t… You know, you can’t even say like your site or whatever.
But you’re saying that’s a bad approach. That it’s really about relationship building. I think this is something that has come up a lot on this show in the last year or two years or so, as well as other places I’ve read about. I think a lot of people view SEO or paid ads, or link building as a potential shortcut to making a ton of money. But these days, especially, it really is about the relationships that you build with other people.
Farzad Rashidi: That’s right. And it’s very difficult. I just want to be completely transparent with folks who are listening is that just like any other channel, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort. And it’s quite a scientific process. We learn over the years by trial and error. I don’t want to be a snake oil salesman here and say, “Hey, you can do this and then be you’ll be a billionaire tomorrow.” No, it’s a grind at any step of the process.
But we can teach you stuff that makes it easier, not to make it as difficult as it was for us before. I actually outlined a whole process in a little eBook that I wrote at Visme called, if you guys want to just Google, Visme Marketing Strategy. There’s an eBook that I wrote down and I sort of explained step by step. And it’s free. You’re not going to get those sales emails, educational resource that we sort of go step by step with screenshots. Okay, “Here’s how you go through the whole content creation process.” I’m happy to shed some light on that and kind of dissect it a little bit more if you’d like.
Joe Casabona: I will definitely link that in the show notes. I found it. It’s visme.co/marketing-strategy.
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Joe Casabona: Let’s talk a little bit about the building relationships and then kind of how it relates to figuring out what content to write and then where SEO falls into all of that, if that makes sense.
Farzad Rashidi: Sure. Yeah, yeah, of course. Absolutely. So let’s go through a little example together. All right, Joe? I think that would be probably a little more clear route for folks who are listening. Actually, let’s take Respona as an example. I think that’d be a good example to kind of work there because that’s exactly what we did over the past two years.
So we have a software company and we sell a link building average software. And it’s a very clear-cut use case. Now, what we had to do, we’re like, “Okay, so there’s a few key parent terms that we sort of categorize ourselves as. One of them being link building. That is the parent keyword.
Now what we wanted to do was start… because there’s almost mathematically an unlimited number of keywords that a person could potentially search for that that has to do with link building. So we need to find a way on how to prioritize these. So the way we want to prioritize the keywords that we want to go after to hit those touchpoints during the customer journey is what are called the opportunity keywords.
And it’s a very simple formula. So basically you want to prioritize keywords that get the highest amount of volume with the lowest amount of competition with the highest amount of commercial intent. So once you pop these into a little formula, then you have a clear-cut way of prioritizing those keywords.
So that formula is, so if you’re using a tool, like for example… There’s a bunch of SEO software tools out there. The two biggest ones being Ahrefs and Semrush. These two will give you some metrics that you can play with. Go ahead, Joe.
Joe Casabona: I was going to say, full disclosure here that Ahrefs is a previous and potential future sponsor of the podcast.
Farzad Rashidi: That’s right. I knew that. That’s right. I see the Ahrefs mark here. We’re also customers of Ahrefs.
Joe Casabona: Nice.
Farzad Rashidi: Great relationship with them. The Semrush team they also have a great product. Anyhow, I don’t mean to plug them too much.
Joe Casabona: No, no, not at all. I just felt I needed to disclose that as we talk.
Farzad Rashidi: No problem. We love both themes over there. But anyhow, so as far as the process of identifying keywords go, the tools that will give you metrics that you can pop into this formula. And that is Joe, for example, the amount of volume, clear, the volume of that keyword. And normally I like to go by based off the number of clicks, not number of searches. Just because there’s a lot of terms that don’t get a whole lot of traffic because there’s a feature snippet up top that just you get the answer.
Number of clicks and the level of competitiveness is determined by a metric called keyword difficulty. So meaning that, for example, if Adobe, if Google, these guys are actually dominating, the search results becomes very difficult for some of the smaller sites to start ranking for those. They want to minimize that.
And also the last metric is, which we determine commercial intent by, is the CPC for that keyword. So advertisers are actually paying Google to get on top of the search results by ranking means they’re making money off of it. So that is a clear indication out there some commercial intent for that keyword.
So you want to prioritize keywords that hit all those three criteria. You can pop it into a little formula. I discuss that in the eBook. And then basically I start with a list. You’re like, okay, for example, what is link building, or link building software, or link building tools?
So when you go through the keywords, it becomes quite clear what stage of the customer journey each person is. Now, you want to determine the user intent for each one of those keywords. And to determine that it’s just as simple as googling it.
So if we want to see, for example, if somebody’s typing in “what is link building?” go on Google in that little incognito tab on your browser and type that in, see what type of content pops up. And there’s normally a very clear trend of the type of content that’s out there. Is it a list post? Is it a blog article? Is it a sales landing page?
So for example, “what is link buildings?” most likely is going to be any information or blog posts, right? And then you want to go ahead and identify the type of content and also find out the longer tail variations of the keywords, especially we want to see, okay, what are some of the other questions that people are trying to get answers for while looking for that keyword?
Now, once we have a list of that keyword, know the user intent, know that list of questions, then second step is to go ahead and start writing that piece of content. That’s the part I tell our writers and our marketing team to stop being scientific, stop thinking about SEO, not just only think right from the heart. Because Google has become extremely smart over the years and identify, okay, what is actually quality content?
You want to write for the user because what happen is that when you start keyword stuffing your content, and you start just writing, like blabbing, what happens is that people come in and take a look, it looks crappy, they just move back to search results and select something else. That’s what we call a bounce in search results. So that’s just sends a signal that users don’t actually like this content.
You want to start putting together visuals, put some videos in there, but make sure your site loads back, all that good stuff. Write content that actually clearly answers the question and do not care about word count. Sometimes longer pieces of content are necessary to answer everything. Sometimes shorter pieces of content do a lot better.
We have to sometimes go back and just redo some of the blog post sizes that we have just because they were underperforming. And then after we started shrinking it, or like let’s cut all the junk that nobody would actually, you know, adding any value, then they started actually performing better because people stay much longer on that page.
And it basically write from the heart, provide value as much as you can. And don’t just go and use drop into an AI tool and just call it a day. Actually spend time. I recommend always if you don’t have resources to create content, create less content.
Joe Casabona: Interesting.
Farzad Rashidi: There’s no such thing “I don’t have enough resources for content or creating quality content.” Stopped producing so much damn content. Create one blog post once a month that is of quality. I think any business in the world can do that.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Hold on. I want to stop you right there because that’s really interesting. There’s a couple of things that you said that really stood out to me. When you write the content stop thinking about SEO. I think that cuts against conventional wisdom. I mean, maybe other SEO companies are saying like, Write for SEO.
You probably know of Yoast and their WordPress plug-in maybe, and how you want to get those green dots for the keywords and the heading. I never pay attention to that because it’s just too much work because like you said, I want to write good content. And if I’m too busy, like worried about stuffing the keyword into a heading, then it’s going to seem contrived. So I really like that you said that. And I think that really resonates with the audience.
And then if you don’t have the resources to write a lot of content, write less content. That’s really interesting to me. I mean, it would help me a lot probably because I put out maybe three, four pieces of content a week. As an independent creator, of course, I’m in the business of content creation. But basically what you’re saying here is quality over quantity, right? If you’re going to spend five hours a week writing content, put that five hours into one really good piece of content.
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. Because, you know, Joe, as you said, it’d be a big waste of time and money if you pump up pieces of content that nobody reads. And it’s just a waste of time. So you got to find a balance of Okay, first of all, if I just start writing from the heart, it’s not going to show up any results, so nobody’s going to come into your website.
So if you’re just exclusively looking at, “Okay, I just need to write quality content,” that’s not good enough. But if you’re like, “Okay, I need to exclusive right for SEO, it’s not good enough.” It’s more of a bell curve. There’s an optimization point in the middle. And that, in my opinion, is to start doing the research pre-hand, know what you have to talk about, what you need to answer.
Now, the content needs to touch on all those points. Does need to include in fact the keyword that you’re mainly looking for in the URL of the post and in the main subject line, but now in the description. But then that content out that user starts reading needs to answer their question, right? And that part is something that you want to focus a lot more on quality over quantity, as I mentioned.
Joe Casabona: God, I love that. Because I mean, as we record this, it’s March. I think this episode is coming out in April. But there’s I think the Ship 30 for 30 challenge going on. And I’ve heard really good things about that. But I’ve always been very suspect. Not to smack talk Dickie Bush or the other guy he works with. But I just don’t think it creates an appreciable habit to say, I need to publish 30 blog posts in 30 days. I think it puts undue stress and undue pressure on the creator if they’re trying to forge that habit.
So I think what you’re saying is absolutely right. It’s a huge waste of time and money to put out content that nobody reads, or listens to, or watches. I say the same thing to my podcast clients on my podcast. It’s like, You don’t need a weekly podcast. If it’s monthly and it’s consistent, and it’s good, people will listen. But if it’s weekly and crappy, you’re going to lose listeners.
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. That’s right. Another aspect is, Joe, that a lot of people have found this out. So a lot of companies are putting out quality pieces of content, a lot of people are going through the steps that I just walked through and producing these content pieces in landing pages. But then what happened for us, basically, we were like, “Hey, this is awesome. This makes a lot of sense. Let’s go ahead and put some of these blog posts and these landing pages.” And guess what happened?
Joe Casabona: What happened?
Farzad Rashidi: Nothing. It was sent into our Google Analytics, so like, Oh, there’s one person.” I’m like, “Nope, that’s my mom.” It was quite discouraging. Because I’m like, “Hey, we’re doing everything right. Why is it not working?”
Then we started realizing that, okay, let’s take one keyword as an example. For example, if you go and Google link building tools, which is like one of the very high value keywords for us, all right? Let me actually do this as I say. Link building tools. So if I can look this on Google right now, there’s 9.2 billion searches for this keyword. 9.2 billion with a B.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Farzad Rashidi: Now, let’s say you’re in the top 0.1% You’re still in the hundreds of thousands in the search result. So how do you go from hundreds of thousands to top 10 which get over 99% of all the clicks. And that’s when it hit us. Like, Okay, well, let’s understand how Google thinks.
A little background. The way Google won the search engine game back in early 2000s was by developing this algorithm called PageRank, which puts ways on webpages not just purely based on the content that’s on that web page but based on his popularity, meaning how other authoritative websites in their space are actually referencing and talking about it.
And the more people are talking about it, depending on how authoritative they are, then it adds more value. Now it becomes a clear trend. Okay, well, this content and a lot of people in their space talk about it, let’s prioritize them. Let’s move it from a 100,000 rank to number one, or two, or three.
That process led to that idea of like, okay, well, let’s start investing some more on content promotion. And there was a very clear trend of traffic and dependent on how much we were spending time on content promotion versus traffic. And what happened was the sweet spot that we found was mind-blowing.
A lot of startups, a lot of companies, small businesses, large, spend a ton of resources on content creation and spend a lot of time on promotion, the ones that do. Most don’t. But we started reversing that ratio to 20% of our marketing or so the way we allocated our resources was completely out of whack. Now we’ve spent 20% of our marketing resources on content creation, the other 80% goes into promotional link building.
Joe Casabona: Interesting.
Farzad Rashidi: Now, that’s what really skyrocketed us, blew us up the water. Now every single one of the content pieces, regardless of whether it’s the blog post, whether it’s landing page, whether it’s a template page became a project. Like, okay, now we produce it, publish it. Okay, that’s 20% of the work. 80% of remainder of the work is going to be spent on promotional link building. Make sure that we placed it in places where it would make contextual sense for someone to reference it to. Not just for the referral traffic that would potentially come but also from the backlink perspective.
And the process of that now is quite time-consuming. I’m not going to lie. Because a lot of people don’t want to do this just because it’s not directly under our control. And humans intrinsically don’t like to do stuff that’s not under your control. It is completely under your control to open up your Google Doc, start writing some content, start producing some podcast episodes, and put it out there. That’s completely under your control, right? You can spend X amount of time, you can produce x amount of content.
But what’s really uncomfortable for us is getting other people now to talk about it and mention it, and reference it. And that’s what’s the deal-breaker for a lot of creators is because they just don’t want to go out of their comfort zone to do this. Now, it’s a competitive advantage for the ones that do.
So what we started doing was basically hiring a team of data miners and we’re finding the right spots using a variety of different strategies. Again, you have to remember, we weren’t some geniuses who sat down and just strategize all these things. These are things that we’ve found out and learned through trial and error over the years. Lots of failures in the middle. Mostly failures I would say. Self-works. And then we just double down the stuff that worked and cut out the stuff that didn’t.
Now, process of content promotion and link building was what was the real key in that whole strategy. And that’s what led to creation of response. We’re like, “Hey, we’re ducted bunch of different tools together, we’re wasting a lot of people’s time and energy doing some of the mundane dirty work of data mining, finding the right person, getting their contacts, reaching out to them, personalizing. Now let’s put that together under one group so that you can do what you would normally do manually but 10 times faster.”
As I mentioned, it was an internal soft group we had put together. We put in front of our team and they were like, “Man, this is ridiculously awesome.” So that’s what we found out we got something here. And that is sort of we’ve also been helping other businesses do the same thing.
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Joe Casabona: First of all, something that I tell a lot of people if they want to be consistent in content creation is to repurpose. I feel like it’s like spiritual cousin, right? You’re not reinventing the wheel by creating a bunch of new content. You’re reinvesting in content you’ve already created.
So let me just ask you, is there an average length of the content? Have you found that like 900 words is better than like 3,000 words or 3,000 words…? Or does it depend on the keyword? I can imagine that people are probably, you know, if they want, like how to upload to Google Drive, that’s like a 500-word article. But how to start a podcast, that’s probably like a 15,000-word article.
Farzad Rashidi: Right. You know, Joe, it’s funny, you mentioned this, because there’s a famous meme in the SEO space called It Depends. There’s that picture of that guy slapping that on any question on a little tank of water. And I’m going to have to use that tape here and say it depends.
Joe Casabona: As a software developer, I’m very familiar with the term “it depends” as well.
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. That’s right. As I mentioned, word count… I’ve also instructed this to our writers because they think they’re doing a good job if they write long pieces of content. And I always tell them like, “I couldn’t care less if it’s 200 words or if it’s 20,000 words. You need to satisfy user intent. Take a look at other articles that are already performing well and create something better, more valuable in the shortest amount of words possible. And if it requires you to go longer, go longer. If it doesn’t, then don’t. There’s no need.
Joe Casabona: I love that. I used to teach in the classroom for a number of years. And it’s something I miss. But I always got the question like, “Oh, how long does the paper have to be?” And I would always say, “As long as you need to answer all of the questions I’ve asked you to answer.”
Farzad Rashidi: Oh, I hate that.
Joe Casabona: Everyone hates it because they want a target within their control. If I say three pages, well, great, now I know I need to make it three pages. But if I just say, well, you need to answer these four questions, and however long it takes you, fine, and they’re like, “Well, have I adequately answered the question?” But it’s true. I didn’t want to read 20, 10 page papers. I’m not a history teacher. I’m a computer science teacher. But that makes perfect sense.
And I asked you this because now I’m thinking, you know, I have a really nice back catalogue of content, especially on my podcast website, which I’m trying to improve and rank better for. And now I’m like, “Have I satisfied user intent.” This is not something that I’ve really looked into. So now it’s time to go back and look at the keywords I really should want to rank for and answer questions that users are actually asking, which in turn will allow me to do what I think the next step you’re going to talk about is, which is, how do we link build? Should I reach out to the podcast host and be like, “Hey, I wrote this post that directly competes with yours. Do you want to link to it?”
Farzad Rashidi: That’s a great question, Joe. To answer that question, and knowing how deep I should get, how much time do we have left?
Joe Casabona: This is terrible. I usually like to go as long as needed. But we I tried to keep the episodes to about 45 minutes. So we have about 15 minutes or so.
Farzad Rashidi: 15 minutes or so. All right. I’m going to use half of that time to answer your question.
Joe Casabona: All right. Great.
Farzad Rashidi: Are you okay?
Joe Casabona: Yeah, great.
Farzad Rashidi: Okay, great. Awesome. Joe, let’s do the… I did that on another podcast and hopefully it wouldn’t be repetitive because the podcaster was asking like, “Hey, you’re the link building guy. How do you build links?” I was like, “Do you want me to get a link from your site?” He goes, “I’m down. Let’s do it.”
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s funny.
Farzad Rashidi: Let’s do it. Let’s actually do it. What the heck? We have nothing to lose. All right.
Joe Casabona: Sounds good. This feels like evergreen content, right? Like you get to just choose. Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah. Okay, sounds good. Let’s do it. So I’m going to just go ahead and randomly pick up blog posts from our blog. The first one I found on our website is called SaaS SEO. That’s part of the keyword. We just published this, gosh, March 11th. Today’s March 16. So five days ago.
So let’s say, Joe, you have a content on your website… Let me actually walk you through the process of what we do on Respona. On the Respona side, you use what we call these Google advanced operators to get your search as granular. So meaning that we can go and identify other pieces of content that are not directly competing with ours, are talking about, for example, what are some of the top marketing strategies for SaaS company? And they listed like 10 different strategies and talked about 10 different strategies, one of which mean SEO. Okay.
Now, let’s say you put together a content piece that you repurpose something from top marketing strategies 2022 for SaaS companies, for software company, and mention SEO in there. So you included that keyword SaaS SEO in the content piece, but the target title of your content piece doesn’t specifically say SaaS SEO. It says something else.
Or you’ve already mentioned another SaaS SEO article on your content piece, which is easily identifiable using a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. So either way, they’re using those two strategies, what we call anchor text strategy or competitor backlink strategy. We actually have a little average strategy help on our website, and we just put it out publicly.
Even if you don’t use Respona, you can still do this yourself manually. Just go to respona.com. At the bottom of the page is Outreach Strategy Hub. We actually give you step by steps on… It’s like a recipe for like, here’s how you do discovery, etc.
All right. So Joe, let’s say I came across your top marketing strategies article and you mentioned SaaS SEO and the target of the title of the article is top marketing strategies. So then Respona what it would do is do… or if you were to do it manually, all right, we want to go and find first we look at the writer of the article, see who’s the writer.
If it’s some freelance writer that you just hired to write it for you, wouldn’t be the right contact for us because he or she doesn’t have any sort of editorial acts. If the writer is you, great. You want to reach out to them directly if the writer is your editor.
If not, there’s no writer on the page, but there is the writer but that person doesn’t actually work at the company, then we want to go look your company up on LinkedIn. Again, Respona automatically does that but we’re just trying to do this manually ourselves.
We’ll find some sort of content manager or SEO person, someone relevant in your company, works there currently who has access to your blog. We want to find that person or people if there are multiple ones, their current direct contact information, verified emails, make sure they’re still valid.
And then reach out and say, “Hey, Joe, I look at your post on top marketing strategies, noticed you talked about SaaS SEO here but didn’t really dive deep into a topic or reference. For example, this article is a couple years old. Our team just put together a comprehensive piece that I think would make a nice addition or replacement. If you were to kind to give us a mention here, I’m more than happy to reference one of your articles in the guest posts I’m writing for HubSpot.”
Joe Casabona: Okay.
Farzad Rashidi: So this is what we call a [fundador?], where we are trying to open up a collaboration with a person that is purely a transaction or exchange that is not reciprocal. It’s not directly. But hey, it’s basically saying, “Joe, if you do this for me, I’m going to do this for you.”
Or another one is, “Hey, I’m actually writing article for HubSpot and I found this article on your website. I think it would make a great addition. And I would really appreciate it if you’d be able to also mention one of our SaaS SEO articles on your blog post.” All right.
Now about 5% to 10% of people say yes to that. We don’t need everybody say yes. All right.5% to 10% say yes, let’s do it. Let’s say, Joe, I reached out to your editor, that person… What’s the name of your editor or let’s it’s all done by you?
Joe Casabona: It’s all done by me.
Farzad Rashidi: All right, perfect. Let’s say the editor’s name is Joe. Like, “Hey, Joe, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you referencing our article here.” That’s given that our article is of high quality, and always recommend folks to play within your lead. So if you just started the website, go reach out to other small sites. If you’re a larger site now, like domain rating of Respona is about 76, 77, now I can reach out to you, which also have high activity website to collaborate because you don’t want to reference articles from smaller sites.
Now, once we have that foot in the door, and then I go ahead and reference your article on a comparable site, right? So let’s say I’m contributing an article on our website and a reference for yours. You got a reference on another website and you also added value to your readers by referencing another quality article in your article. All right?
Here’s the kicker. So that’s 33 and a third step of the process. We have a three-step link-building process. Step one, transaction linkage. Number two, now to my fundador Joe, I’m like, “Thank you, Joe for adding a link. I went ahead and referenced your article on my guest post on HubSpot. By the way, I was taking a look at your…” What would be like a competing website? Like, for example, Neal Schaffer, I think he’s also got a podcast with a lot of good content and Backlinko. And what would be websites in your space that you respect?
Joe Casabona: I mean, if we’re looking at like the podcast services, specifically, there’s the podcast host probably a lot bigger than my site, though. But let’s just go with them.
Farzad Rashidi: Okay, Neal Schaffer and say [unintelligible Marketing. All right. So Ahrefs or Semrush, these tools give you their top competitors. You’re like, “Okay, this site is on organic traffic levels competing with this and that website.” So run us through what we call a keyword gap analysis. We’re like, “Okay, what are some of the keywords that those two sites are both ranking for that you aren’t?” And then we take a screenshot of that keyword. Let’s say the keyword topic on that is marketing plan template. All right.
Like, “Hey, Joe, thanks for adding our link. By the way, I was taking a look at Ahref today and I noticed that both Neal Schaffer and [unintelligible 00:46:08] marketing guys are both ranking for a marketing plan template, but you guys aren’t. I actually have a member of our marketing team just put together a marketing plan template for us. We’d love to write an article for your website covering that keyword for you.” What would you say?
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, if you’ve presented me with the details, I’m way more likely to say yes to that.
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. Over 90% say yes, because of two reasons. One, we already collaborated together. We already broke bread together. Two, I’m hitting you up again with a very highly targeted pitch, taking your self-interest in mind. All right. Then by mentioning a couple of your competitors, that also is a nail on chalkboard for some people. And when they see it, they’re like, “Yes, I gotta have this keyword.”
And now we lead to this third step. Okay, which is building partnerships. Now that we collaborate with Joe, like, “Listen, Joe, we already did a transaction on link exchange, we already collaborated together, we already contributed to the blog to your website. We’re buddies now.” All right.
So I actually published this guest post on other quality websites quite often and I bet you have quality content on your site. And if you also contribute to other websites, we’d love to partner up together. So anytime that you feel necessary or anytime would make sense, you could reference one Respona article on there and we do the same for you.”
Now what happens over time, you’re going to end up with a dozen of these partners. Half of them are going to be no good, not going to be active, they’re going to be very responsive. That’s fine. But then now we have like 5, 6, 7, really, really good partners.
And here’s what happens. Next time you go through the process and you get a 5%, 10% success or on your transactional link exchange, then you pitch them and 90% say yes, then you have the opportunity to reference five or six of other partners of yours who also quality content in that guest post.
Here’s the real key that creates a little ripple effect. Now, every time you contribute an article to another website, it indirectly results in your partner’s reciprocating by five or six other backlinks from five or six other different websites. And over time, you can turn this into a machine that keeps referencing your website and keeps referencing your articles and then their article. That’s the real way.
Now, it’s easier said than done. And I’m going to be completely upfront with you. It requires a level of experimentation. There was a messaging, incentives, figuring out what works best for you in your space. And what matters is at the end of the day you’re going to end up with 10% of your strategies working really well. Cut that out 90%, hold on to stuff that works.
Joe Casabona: Wow. I’ll just say up front that I am basically really turned off anytime I get any kind of backlink request, but that process made me want to try this more and be more open. Because obviously what I’m doing isn’t working as well as I’d like it to. But I think the core thing that you’re mentioning here is there is a… it’s not just the “hey do this for me.” It’s “I’ll do this for you. You do this for me. Now we’re working together. By the way, I did a little bit of legwork for you.”
And I think that people are willing to pay back when favors are done for them or whatever. But then you have this partnership. I mean, that definitely works. I can vouch for that. There are a few podcasts bookers I work with because they’ve done the leg work, they’ve recommended good guests. I mean, the same thing can and should happen with the written content too. So I really like this strategy. It’s super interesting.
We’re coming up on time. So I’ll just ask you, you know. For the listeners, in the pre-show I did say I don’t like these interviews to become commercials for the product. But tell me a little bit about Respona now. How does it work? Because now you’ve given us the hard part, right?
Farzad Rashidi: Right.
Joe Casabona: If you do this yourself, this is a more resistive path. But you’ve built a tool with this tried and true process. So tell us a little bit about how it works.
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. So I always say this. Also, I like to mention this as disclaimer. That if you’re a startup, if you’re a small company and have no resources, don’t come pay for all these fancy tools. Respona included. There’s always easier ways to do it. There’s always stuff you can do manually. Always start looking for tools when it becomes too hard to manage. All right?
And it’s funny sometimes in our demo calls, I always tell them, I’m like, “Hey, you guys just started out. You should probably just do this manually, honestly. Don’t start paying us until… Unless you have a pain, don’t try to solve it, right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah. It’s like how people on Twitter are saying, “Do things that don’t scale.”
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: Do things that don’t scale for a while until you need to scale?
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. Command all of the audience not to go sign up for Respona. There’s a ton of free educational material we’ll put out. There’s a ton of strategies. And I’ll always try and tell our content team, Like anything you guys teach people, always tell them an alternative way of doing it manually. Because as a matter of fact, Respona does no magic. We do no magic. Everything Respona does is just helping you do what you do manually, but 10 times faster.
So Respona basically enables you to reach out to any person in the world from any website in a streamlined format. So you can basically either import a list from like Ahrefs or if you have a list of articles, normally raw information from any link building campaign starts from the bunch of articles.
Respona helps you filter those out and find the specific content pieces that you need to reach out to. And then it goes and does the research automatically in terms of that process. You remember I walked you through of go start from the writer. If not, find the content manager. If not, then find a generic email after last resort, finding the emails, verifying them. Make sure it’s the relevant person, contact manager or person in your industry, not just a random software engineer or a support email.
So starting from basically finding the right websites to not automating finding the right person to getting their contact information directly. Now, the last step is that you put a template for the pitch. But you also want to go above and beyond and personalize those. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Now, let’s actually mention something they’ve talked about in an article so it doesn’t sound like a cookie-cutter template you got.
So Respona gives you some snippets from the article you can work through and basically be able to do what you would normally. It give you the same flexibility as manual average, but in a more streamlined form. And once you go in and click “launch” or sending out emails from your own email accounts, it automatically follows up and gives us some metrics and statistics on how well these campaigns are performing.
So it basically brings the whole process from A to Z under one roof and automates a lot of the dirty work so that you can focus more on personalization and collaborations than doing research and dealing with spreadsheets and all that stuff.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So I’m going to share two things with the listeners right now. Right? One is that I do my guest outreach and some of my sponsor outreach and the outreach for me to go on other people’s podcasts. I call it semi-automated. There’s a Google sheet where I fill in the name and the email, etc. And it’s mostly a canned email. But there’s one cell in that spreadsheet that’s like personal message. And it’ll insert it in an appropriate spot.
So that’s kind of the way I’m doing it because it does make it feel more personal. And you’re including the same information anyway. It sounds like Respona does all the hard stuff, right? Find the email addresses and whatnot.
I’m also going to share this. Most of the pitches I get to come on this show are like, “Hey, Joe, saw you have a podcast called How I Built It. I want to pitch my guests Jim Baseball, he’s like the greatest hitter to ever walk the earth. Want him on your show?” And what Farzad shared with me in the pre-show interview was that the pitch for you to come on the show came from Respona. Is that accurate?
Farzad Rashidi: That’s right.
Joe Casabona: I had no idea. It felt super personal to the point where usually When I get those pitches, I have a TextExpander, full disclosure TextExpander is a sponsor, TextExpander snippet that pre-populates an email and it just says, “Yeah, if you want to apply here.” I actually wrote a customer response back thanking Dylan for the kind words and saying I’m open to potential guests.
You say there’s no magic, but the pitch I got from Respona worked because I really thought it was like a handwritten email. So kudos. Well done. Nice work.
Farzad Rashidi: I appreciate that. Thank you. I always say you could have done that yourself manually. You don’t necessarily need tool like Respona. But what Dylan did is that we’re actually plugged right into Listen Notes and iTunes. So it’s a live engine for podcasts. And then once you basically pop in, like, for example, you can find people in the similar space that we are on, and it will pull up all the episodes that they’ve been a guest on. And this tells you three things. One, these podcasts accept guests, two, they are relevant to our space. And also you can use that episode as a hook to personalize the pitch.
And then what Respona does is it automatically goes and finds the host and finds the emails. And all that stuff’s automated. And then now since all that process was done quickly, then you have time to actually… so you pulls up the last five episodes of that podcast, and then you can actually reference something from one of the episodes into podcasts and pitch. And then maybe also connect with them on LinkedIn.
And then once you set them out, then that process is, again, done automatically. So that human touch is added right at the right time when it needs to. The rest of the stuff is completely automated. That could save some time.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, really, really impressive. Awesome. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is you’ve given us so much, but do you have any trade secrets for us?
Farzad Rashidi: Secrets, okay. The secret is things always sound a lot easier when somebody talks about it on a podcast. I remember when we first started Respona, I was listening to this podcast episode. I was driving and I was listening to a podcast episode from the founder of Typeform or something and the guy was just like… the way he was talking… I mean, I love Typeform and their team. You know, they’ve done great things in their new company.
But I remember the podcast interviewer asking him and was like, “How was the journey at the beginning? How did you get the early customer?” And it says something… I don’t remember exactly. But he was like, “Yeah, the first million just came very easily.” And I just remember I was so discouraged to the point I just stopped the podcast. I was like, “This is very discouraging. It’s a very uphill battle here. Every day there’s a new crisis. There’s something going on. And it doesn’t feel like it’s coming out easily. It’s the exact opposite of that.”
And when I’m talking through these strategies, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. But it means it’s possible. And you won’t know how difficult it is or how easy it is until you actually go and take action. And that’s the only thing I want to leave you with, is that out of the stuff I’m going to talk about, I don’t want to make anything sound overly easy. Because when you actually start doing, I don’t want people to be discouraged. This is supposed to be difficult because if it was too easy to do, everybody would have done it and it wouldn’t be effective anymore.
Joe Casabona: Wow. I love that. That’s a great trade secret, too. It’s something that I tried to tell, again, my podcast students. I make most of my income from podcast either sponsorships or services. And when they start, they’re like, “How do I get sponsors?” I’m like, the same exact thing you recommend. I build relationships. I tap my network. People trust me. It’s not going to be easy. It’s work. And I’m not going to tell you you’re going to make six figures in six months. But you put in the work and you can because I’m just some guy who did it. I just worked really hard to do it.
So what a fantastic trade secret. Things always sound a lot easier when someone talks about it on a podcast. I feel like that’s a really good pull quote. Farzad Rashidi, thanks so much for joining us. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?
Farzad Rashidi: On LinkedIn. There is not a whole lot of Farzad Rashidi on LinkedIn. That should be pretty easy to find.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. And I believe he did share that link with me as well, so I will link to that and everything we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/263. If you want to become a member of the Creator Crew and hear Farzad and I talk about kind of going about creating content a little bit more, you can do that as well. Sign up for just 50 bucks a year. That’s one Starbucks coffee a month basically.
Farzad, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Farzad Rashidi: All pleasure is mine. Thank you for having me on the show, Joe.
Joe Casabona: And thank you so much for listening. Thanks to our sponsors who make the show possible. If you enjoyed this show, head over to howibuilt.it/263 and check out all the show notes, visit the sponsors, visit Farzad. But until next time, get out there and build something.