What You Can Learn From MicroConf 2014 – Even If You Didn’t Attend

Hi there.

Maybe you – just like me – didn’t make it to MicroConf 2014. But that doesn’t mean you (and I) can’t learn a lot of things from MicroConf 2014. There was so much talk on Twitter (#MicroConf) and so much to learn from it.

I’ll start off with my personal selection, but you’ll find a link to Chris Vannoy’s notes at the end of this post.

Personal Selection

What better way to start off with than Patrick McKenzie’s iconic quote? I can only imagine how often those words have been uttered in the hallowed halls at MicroConf.

Hiten Shah lead off the conference with a great talk starting, scaling and growing your startup. One of the best take-aways from his talk was that you should charge your customers as early as possible. Remember that money is the only real validation. If people are not willing to pay for it, they don’t find it valuable enough

Another gem from Hiten. Focus on your customers and making them successful; Growth will come to you. Don’t obsess over some feature or how awesome you think your product is. This is incredibly hard for me. But nevertheless: Customers first, you/your product second.

I’m not a huge fan of this. I think that a lot of those that follow you back are either on auto-follow-back or they care as much about their Twitter feed as you do. Because following more than 1,000 accounts will flood your feed with mediocre tweets from people you’re not even interested in.
I strongly believe that this behaviour results in a first-class vanity metric. You’ll have lots of followers and no engagement. There’s no shortcut in building meaningful connections.
But – if you can – PLEASE proof me wrong on this.

This one is a really important when you have people working for you. Empower them to make decisions for you. Yes, errors will happen. Don’t be afraid of that. A wrong decision now and then won’t hurt as much as everyone constantly waiting for you to make up your mind.
Often it is easy to remedy a wrong decision. More often than not it is NOT wrong at all – just another way to skin a cat. The way you do things is NOT the only way to do it, embrace different or even better solutions.

Another thing to take away from Mike’s talk was this list of directories to announce your up-coming startup to.

Going beyond that age old wisdom Mike advocates to make the following thought experiment: “What if you only had 4 hours each week to get ALL your work done?”
Three tips for the stressed out Micropreneur:

  • Don’t work nights & weekends (corollary: go from moonlighting to full-time ASAP)
  • Get your sleep
  • No late snacking

That is definitely something I’m going to use with my upcoming product LinksSpy.com. I’ve named the plans “Individual”, “Marketing Team” and “Agency” – we’ll see how well this works.

Here Patrick is talking about testimonials and logo walls on your website. For instance it is OK to have a logo wall stating “build on the same platform as: BMW, IBM, Oracle, etc” when you’re using Heroku to host your application – even if those companies are NOT your  customers.

I’m not entirely sure what this refers to, but I assume it is about putting too much stress on yourself as a founder; neglecting exercise, sleep and eating right. I remember Sherry giving an incredible talk at MicroConf 2013 about staying healthy as an entrepreneur’s spouse.

No explanation needed for this one.

I think that this point is really important. We often obsess about features left and right. All the while features don’t make our offering unique; our message does. Our customer support does. Our brand does.
And while I’m at it: Talk about your idea BEFORE you launch. Nobody is going to steal it. Your idea is not special and probably a dozen people have thought of it before you. Don’t be afraid of talking about it and get some feedback.

Another golden rule of building a great product: It’s about your customers, not your product. Them, not you.

You should start with small baby steps and build your way up from there. Get a random stranger to send you money over the internet (NO scams please); that moment will be magical. It certainly was for me.

Such an amazing quote from Nathan’s talk. Also: Teaching is a LOT of fun. Give it a shot.

Gumroad has a lot of data on people marketing their products. Ryan Delk shared quite a bit of it apparently and one big take-away – tweeted at least a dozen times – is how you should price your tiers. That is a great heuristic and you should apply it in the absence of own data – i.e. when starting your business.

Another gem from the Gumroad data. Having multiple price points allows your customers to pay you more; do it!

Unsurprisingly email still works best to market your product. Set up that drip email campaign already 🙂

This one is absolutely interesting. When you use retargeting on visitors, don’t send them to your front page when they click on the retargeting ad. Send them to a custom landing page and funnel them into a drip email campaign. Educate them and THEN try to sell. Great take-away and definitely something I did wrong in the past.

I knew that you should remove existing customers from your retargeting list (but I didn’t do it). But this idea is mind-blowing genius! Don’t delete them from your list, put them in another list, serve different ads. E.g after signup offer them a webinar, get them to invite their team mates, whatever makes sense with your product. This is genius.

Another good reason to get the credit card as early as possible.

Definitely have to do this for LinksSpy. I imagine you get a lot of great insights about what is missing from your product.

Links to further resources

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Memorable Quotes from MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Most Memorable Quotes Of MicroConf 2013

I am a big fan of quotes and MicroConf 2013 delivered its fair share of those. So without further ado:

“It is my fault. I can’t even blame my employees, because I don’t have any”Rob Walling

“Nobody wants to buy software. People want to buy outcomes: software is just a means to the end.” – Brennan Dunn

“Cash is king. Annual prepay is God.”Jason Cohen

“You don’t want to be in a feature war with another product. You want something that can be finished.”Jason Cohen

“Predictable acquisition of recurring revenue with annual prepay in a good market creates a cash machine.”Jason Cohen

“The Iron Law of the market: Markets that don’t exist, don’t care how smart you are.”Josh Kaufman

“It doesn’t matter how valuable the thing you created is if people don’t know you exist.”Josh Kaufman

“Collecting email addresses is a next best step to taking money for validation: nobody who won’t give email will ever pay you. “Patrick McKenzie paraphrasing Josh Kaufman

“EVERY speaker at MicroConf is in B2B (that should tell you something)”Jason Cohen

“If customers didn’t like long-form copy then people wouldn’t buy from them.”Joanna Wiebe

“Copywriting 101: Replace WE with YOU”Joanna Wiebe

“If a metric won’t change how you behave, it’s a bad metric.”Ben Yoskovitz

“Discovering correlation lets you predict the future. Discovering causation lets you CHANGE the future.”Ben Yoskovitz

“If you get featured on the App Store, it will change your life… for two weeks.”Patrick Thompson

“I had a problem and decided to use Java to solve it.” “Now I have a ProblemFactory”Rob Walling trying to silence the crowd

“Housekeeper is cheaper than therapist; Therapist is cheaper than divorce.”Sherry Walling handing out actionable advice on business with a family

“Don’t internationalize until you max out English / your native market.”Rob Walling

“You should increase your pricing based on the value your customer is receiving.”Rob Walling

“If you’re in doubt, ask for credit card up front.”Rob Walling

“The harder I work the luckier I get.”Rob Walling

“Doing things that don’t scale — awesome idea at times”Erica Douglass

“Free consultation/integration for any customer at $100+ a month is incredible sales and customer dev tool.”Erica Douglass

“Being frugal doesn’t help you grow your business.”Erica Douglass

“You are not your customer”Erica Douglass

“Make your customers look good in the eyes of their customers”Erica Douglass

“Be brave. Charge more + deliver experience to match. Do what others can’t /won’t. Do what doesn’t scale at the start.”Erica Douglass

“Lesson 1: never give money to an SEO guy.”Dave Collins as he takes $20 from attendee

“Dont write content for Google, write content for visitors.”Dave Collins

“Customer Development: If you ask questions in the wrong way, you get bad data that leads you in the wrong direction.”Hiten Shah

“How you get to the customer is as important, if not more, than what you get to the customer”Hiten Shah

“Hypothesis Framework:
Our hypothesis is that a (certain type of person) have a problem doing (certain type of task).”
Hiten Shah

“The more I help you, the more you will trust me.”Nathan Barry

“Sales is a learned skill and a process. Always iterate on your sales pitch.”Mike Taber

“First impressions will dominate regardless of how often it is contradicted by new experiences.”Mike Taber

“People don’t buy software, they buy solutions to problems.”Mike Taber

“Experience might be the best teacher, but the tuition rates are really high”Mike Taber

“Teaching is the best form of marketing. Only sell to a market you have something to teach.”Nathan Barry

“It’s not customer validation until you have their credit card”Nathan Barry

“By increasing trust and lowering friction, it increases the odds that somebody becomes a customer.”Brennan Dunn

“The way to establish trust is to over-deliver value.”Brennan Dunn

“When somebody is trying to sell you something, you look for any excuse to bail.”Brennan Dunn

“Everybody should go home and implement an email mini-course.”Unknown; from twitter via Patrick McKenzie

“You may go through 4 or 5 accountants [before you find a good one]. That’s normal”Cameron Keng

“Income is one thing. Taking 3 months off for your wedding and not losing income is something else entirely.”Patrick McKenzie

“Lifetime email sequences after customer relationship starts can dramatically increase retention”Patrick McKenzie

“if you’re providing monetary value to your customer, email them regularly. Remind them in dollars. Get them promoted”Patrick McKenzie

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Patrick McKenzie – Building Things To Help Sell The Things You Build – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Patrick McKenzie (@patio11)

  • “Bingo Card Creator is doing business on hard mode”

Once More, With(out) Feeling

  • Listen to Peldi: Start a business that fascinates you (or risk burning out on it)
  • FYI for lifestyle design: your own business is where it is at
  • Becoming an entrepreneur and delivering value to the world is an righteous and awesome way to walk down in life

Quick Wins To Pay For MicroConf 2014

  • Fundamental SaaS Equation: [traffic] * [conversion_rate] * [ARPU] / (1 – [churn])
  • Traffic is the hardest to optimize for – see Rob Walling’s Blog
  • Conversion rate throughout funnel is easier, but takes weeks/months to see results
  • ARPU you can manipulate with a few minutes of work
  • Churn: run your own Operation Retention

Star #1: Charge. More.

  • killed $9 plan
  • Added $199 plan due to apparent demand

Star #2: Drip Email Campaign

  • Drip email marketing is often/typically pre-signup, lifecycle emails are post-signup
  • Lifecycle emails require more app-specific logic
  • Very helpful: good understanding of funnel
  • Not required:
    • Lots of volume
    • Great copywriting

Star #3: Annual Billing

  • Offer discount (“1 month free”) if they switch to annual billing
  • Offer it to “loyal customers” over email
  • One click + confirmation to switch
  • Conversion Rate 10 – 25%
  • Immediate revenue of $200 per email sent

Raising Your ARPU, Trivially

  • Consider Bob with 280 appointments in the small business plan ($79)
  • Is Bob happy? How can we make him happier?
  • We should do him a solid and offer to upgrade to “Office” plan ($199) at a discount
  • Did this at a consulting client:
    • Run my SQL query of everyone who is within 20% of quota on FEATURE_1, FEATURE_2 or FEATURE_3
    • Add new special offers for the higher plans with a slight (~20%) discount
    • Write email offering upgrade to special offer
    • Make +N% revenue per year

Investigating Low Conversion Rates

  • Check if users are actually using your service
  • Start walking your customers through the product using lifecycle email​
  • send emails based on how successful they are in using the product

Lifecycle Emails

  • Day Zero: Auto-generated Welcome Email
  • Day Three: “Personal” welcome email from “me”
  • Day Twenty:
    • Trial successful: sell them hard
    • Trial not successful: rescue the trial
  • Day Twenty Seven: “Incoming Charge”

Star #4: Weekly Check-Up (“Get Them Promoted”)

  • High perceived value
  • Great engagement
  • Creates “ongoing earned media” via the option to embed announcements / links / etc.
  • Makes ROI discussions academic

Star #5: Digging into Individual Accounts

  • Bob’s usage goes up & to the right –> his business is doing well
  • If he cancels OR a credit card billing fails, he gets a call (because probably his CC data needs to be updated)
  • everyone gets 3 dunning emails
    • Get to the point ASAP
    • Prominent link to capture updated CC data
    • Extend a 3 day grace period, try daily within grace
    • Don’t forget a “You didn’t update so we took the liberty of pausing your account” email

How To Quit Consulting

  • People say consulting doesn’t scale.
  • Ways to scale consulting:
    • Move your rate up, dramatically
    • Hire people
    • Improve your utilization at the margin
  • So why did I quit?
    • Constant rat race to get new clients
    • Lots of unpaid time doing prospecting / proposal / administrative work
    • You have a boss and you have to go to work every day
  • ​Productized consulting
    • Your most common / most valuable consulting engagement, delivered without the full dance
    • An e-book / video course / etc.
    • A training event / seminar / etc
  • Sell it through email
  • Offer it at a variety of price points
  • Make several gigs worth of money in a repeatable, scalable, tweakable fashion

My Non-software Product

  • Most common consulting engagement (2010): “We send no email. Can you, like fix that?”
  • I would implement:
    • Drip marketing (see MicroConf 2012 presentation)
    • Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
  • It generally required:
    • Lots of sales/convincing
    • A bit of coding
    • Copywriting by me
  • Why choose this over consulting (from a customer’s perspective)?
    • Because it is $500 vs. $20,000
    • Because you couldn’t find somebody to do this for you
    • Because you’re not sure you can get to it right now
    • Because it’s a cheap easy way “to test the waters”
  • Why Not Get It Free on the Internet?
    • Because real businesses spend money on problems
    • “Free, if you have two week to research it” is not free to someone who cuts paychecks
    • Because paid initiatives signal quality and help to reduce roadblocks to adoption within an organization
  • The Key To Marketing It
    • Started building an email list a few months in advance
    • Focused 75% on teaching people stuff (pricing, selling to enterprises, A/B testing, etc) and 25% on telling them about upcoming product
    • Sent two, count ’em, two sales emails
    • Sent folks to a long copy page

Nathan Barry Is An Effing Genius

  • Three packages: $249 / $99 / $39
  • Sales focuses on what customer gets not on what the price is
  • Packaging is a huge win (largest package made ~75% of total revenue)

What Did My Actual Product Look Like?

  • Me speaking into webcam and $60 microphone
  • Loosely scripted. If I were to do it again, I would add slides
  • Took ~2 weeks to record plus video editor @ $3,000
  • Hosted video on Wistia and rolled my own delivery platform (you should probably use Gumroad or similar)
  • Partnered with folks with related interests: additional value to customers at vanishingly little work to me (e.g. CopyHackers for copy writing)
  • Revenue:
    • Launch day: $12,862
    • Next week or two: $16,576
    • “Reminder: Sale ends today”: $15, 579
    • TOTAL: $64,608

Keys To Product Success

  • email, email, email. Get people on it, delight them, teach them, sell only occasionally
  • Target a pain point that you know there is demand for
  • Work on your copy.
  • Deliver quality products, because you have only one reputation.

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Cameron Keng – Taxes for SaaS – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Cameron Keng (@cameronkeng)

  • When you loose money, claim your tax refund
    • I lost $20,000
    • asked for tax refund
    • got $10,000 refunded
    • re-invested money into the next business idea
  • Failure should not stop you, keep soldiering on
  • “And then I said: Pay taxes? What am I…. poor?”
  • Online sales tax is coming – 27 states currently require you to pay them Amazon style

Incorporations

  • You should never incorporate, except:
    • Is there liability?
    • Is there profit?
    • Is there investment?
  • pass-through vs. corps
    • Generally, corps suck
    • Pass-throughs are cool
  • tax credits & deductions
    • R&D tax credits (this is great, because we are all developing software – right?)
    • Domestic production activities deduction

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Brecht Palombo – How a Non-Technical Founder Built a 6 Figure SaaS App Using Only Free Public Data Sources – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Brecht Palombo (@distressedpro)

History

  • Started Real Estate Auction Business in October 2006
  • Started Real Estate Brokerage right before the bubble in August 2007
  • Until your back’s up against the wall you never know yourself that much at all.

3 Keys that got me to $100k

  1. Open up – make most of your content available to everyone
  2. Niche, Niche, Niche 
    No: “real estate investing”
    Yes: “list of banks in Alabama with REO”
  3. Teach – 62 % of conversions come from free email course

2 Big Mistakes

  • Distracted by shiny objects
    • Random Affiliate Niche Site
    • Discovered twilio
  • Fire Bad Contractors Quickly

Focus

  • best way: Goals

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Brennan Dunn – The Long-Tail Sale – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Brennan Dunn (@brennandunn)

Slides on Speakerdeck (embedding does not work – if you know how to fix it, please let me know)

The Happy Path of Sales

  1.  Google Search Results
  2. Landing Page
  3. Signup (& Profit $$$)
  • The “Happy Path of Sales” is extremely high friction
  • Initially CPA > LTV

 

Increase Trust & Lower Friction

  • Trust (“Who are you, and why do you want my money?”)
    • Best way to establish trust: OVER-deliver on value
    • Teach them something that helps them (Ex: teach them to be better freelancers and increase rates)
  • Friction
    • caused by:
      • Sign up
      • Setup my account
      • Get familiar with the product
      • Invite team & explain the product to them – and why we need the product
      • OMG throw a real project at this and pray I don’t embarrass myself
    • When anyone is trying to sell you anything, we’re looking for any excuse to bail. You have to overcome objections

New Funnel

  1. Freelancer’s Weekly (Newsletter)
  2. Double Your Freelancing Rate ($49)
  3. The Blueprint ($49 – $249)
  4. Consultancy masterclass (live workshop, $1,199)
  5. Planscope (SaaS)

Metrics of the New Funnel

  • CPC 2.10 with LinkedIn ads
  • 40% conversion –> $5.25 per subscriber
  • List of 4,507
  • drove $230,876 in revenue
  • = $51.22 (10x) per subscriber

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Nathan Barry – Zero to $5,000/month – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Nathan Barry

  • eBook revenue curve is essentially one short spike and then rapidly approaches zero (at best a low plateau)

Webapp Challenge

  • rules
    • start without an idea
    • build to $5,000/month in MRR
    • 6 month deadline
    • only spend $5,000 of my own money
    • only work on it 20 hours a week

Lessons Learned

  1. Teaching is the best form marketing
  2. Only sell to a market you have something to teach
  3. It’s not customer validation till you have their credit card
    1. “That is a cool idea” IS NOT ENOUGH
    2. “I would probably buy that” IS NOT ENOUGH
    3. “I would pre-order that” IS NOT ENOUGH
  4. Being your own customer is wonderful
  5. Transparency works
  6. Focus on making your customers successful

Current Success Level

  • $1,513 monthly recurring revenue
  • 32 paying customers

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Mike Taber – How to Sell Anything to Anyone – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Mike Taber (@singlefounder) – a.k.a. the Liquor Fairy

  • We are all in sales – all the time
  • Sales is a learned skill
  • Sales is a process
  • Sales can be used for Good … or Evil

Why do people buy things? (emotional triggers)

  • Greed (Mike’s kids are supposedly good at this)
  • Altruism (Tom’s shoes)
  • Pride (it makes me look smart / good – MicroConf ticket)
  • Fear (bad things will happen, if I don’t buy – insurance)
  • Envy (Rolex anyone?)
  • Shame (Flowers for your wife – I guess)

Headline

  • First impression takes .2 seconds on page
  • Impression is virtually set in stone after 2.6 seconds
  • First Impressions last forever
  • First impressions will dominate regardless of how often it is contradicted by new experiences

Stop Selling Software

  • People don’t buy Software – they buy Solutions to Problems
  • Billy:
    • Feature: Bluetooth
    • Benefit: Music/Phone Calls
    • Valued End State: Self-Esteem
  • Mom:
    • Feature: Bluetooth
    • Benefit: Music/Phone Calls
    • Valued End State: Peace of Mind (she’ll be able to call Billy at any time)
  • you need to talk to the following two people:
    • just purchased your product
    • just stopped using your product
  • Products find a certain market only when they help their customers get done the jobs that they have already been trying to do.” – Clayton Christensen
    Job of the Milkshake: Make the long commute easier

People don’t Buy Software

  1. They buy ways to overcome pain
  2. They are outsourcing processes
  3. They choose to allow other people to build things they need
  4. They don’t prescribe to the “Not invented here” syndrome
  5. [MISSING]

Iterating on Your Sales Pitch

  • Make the pitch all about what is important to them
  • Don’t be afraid to invoke fear or shame (“Would you like to help kids with cancer?”)
  • Be a sexist: Invoke the shame in the women (it works better than with men)
  • Do A/B testing

Enterprise Tactics

  • Ask if they have a Budget and how big it is
  • Ask for Authority (Who makes the decision? Ask to speak to that person!)
  • Ask for Need (Why would you like to do that?)
  • Ask for Timeline (How long will the purchase process take? Is there a deadline?)
  • Use Market Data (Example: After 6 months there are 10 pounds of human hair in your carpet)
  • Lead them to Yes
  • “Magic” Enterprise Pricing (2 Dollars below the assigned budget)

 

Experience might be the best teacher… but the tuition rates are really high

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Hiten Shah – Killer (Content) Marketing – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Hiten Shah (@hnsah)

Watch the video (sorry, but I’m not allowed to embed it here)

Slides:

 

 

  • Learn things by doing them
  • Two strategies:
    • Hire as few people and try to make as much money per employee as possible (CrazyEgg)
    • Try to grow as much as possible (KISSmetrics)

Story of a Product from Idea to Acquisition (KISSinsights)

  • Do customer development
  • Find the core problem (of your customer)
  • Learn how to ask the right questions
  • Always begin with a hypothesis
    • Problem hypothesis: Our hypothesis is that [certain type of person] have a problem doing [certain type of task]
    • As specific as possible (e.g. localize the people to people in your city)
    • Example: Our hypothesis that product managers have a problem doing effective customer research
  • ​How we learned
    • 20 phone interviews
    • 3 paper user tests
    • 2 landing pages
    • 1 hacky MVP
  • What we learned
    • People are NOT doing customer research
    • They want private feedback and targeting
    • It requries developer involvement
    • It is a constant pain
  • “How you get to the customer is as important, if not more, than what you get to the customer” – Patrick Vlaskovits
  • Channels get crowded fast.
  • Dropbox used Adwords –> Cost Per Acquisition: $233 – $388. For a $99 product –> FAIL
  • Solution: Make your own channel (double incentivized referral program)
  • Customer Development
    • Who are your customers? (product managers)
    • Where do they hang out? (other people’s websites)
    • How should you engage them?
  • Your marketing has to align with your customers

Create Your Audience

  • Build, Grow, Convert
  • The more I help you, the more you will trust me” – Nathan Barry
    • Build: Free Content
    • Grow: Paid Content
    • Convert: SaaS Subscription
  • Write with the intention of appealing to a specific audience.” – Brennan Dunn
    • Build: Email newsletter
    • Grow: Paid Content
    • Convert: SaaS Subscription
  • Who has time to learn every new piece of software they run into? Not me. I’m pretty sure you don’t either” – Ruben Gamez
    • Build: Free Guide and Newsletter
    • Grow: Sample Proposal (mini-demo of his SaaS product)
    • Convert: SaaS Subscription
  • Teach people how to solve their problems
  • Learn from your audience and customers
  • Questions you can ask your customers:
    • How did you first find about us?
    • What persuaded you to purchase from us?
    • How would you describe [PRODUCT] to your friends?
    • What prompted you to start looking for this type of service?
    • If you could change one thing about this website, what would it be?
    • What other products or services should we offer?
    • Which other options did you consider before choosing our products?
    • Why did you decide to use [PRODUCT]?
    • Why do you use [PRODUCT] instead of an alternative?
    • What would persuade you to use [PRODUCT] more often?
    • How would you persuade people like you to use [PRODUCT] ?

Strategies for B2B distribution

  • Use Platforms with distribution potential
  • How to optimize integrations
    • Integrations make YOUR product better
    • Measure your conversions and revenue
    • Discover valuable integrations
    • Ask customers about integrations
    • Make your partner pages awesome
  • How to optimize “Work Emails”
    • Optimize on-boarding
    • Show people who they should follow
    • Utilize invitations during on-boarding
    • Measure # of people in every company
    • Discover the engaging interactions
  • How to optimize embeds (like Youtube, Slideshare)
    • Why should people embed?
    • Make it as easy as possible to embed
    • Track how well your embeds convert
    • Test relevant call to actions
    • Optimize for search, but don’t obsess
  • How to optimize “Powered By”
    • What are you Powering?
    • Test the copy of your call to action
    • Test and optimize your landing pages
    • Track views, clicks, conversions and LTV
    • Measure individual effectiveness
  • How to optimize “Free Stuff”
    • Build a free tool that helps your customers
    • Map to customer decision making
    • Think about what you can repurpose
    • Educate your prospects
    • Test your ideas minimally (ghetto)
    • Measure and optimize revenue

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Dave Collins – SEO Demystified – MicroConf 2013

The MicroConf Hub Page with links to all the notes for all the talks can be found here.

Speaker: Dave Collins (@thedavecollins)

Watch the video (sorry, but I’m not allowed to embed it here)

Notes

  • 70% of SEO is simple
    • Almost every one can do it
    • It always works (usually)
  • A lot of Bullshit going on in SEO land
  • For every person who knows what they’re talking about in SEO, there are ______ who are talking out of their _____
  • Legitimate SEO aligns the agendas of your website and Google
  • What do users want from Google? HELP!
    • 30 Trillion pages in Google index
  • What does Google want? Money! Or help people find answers (Depending on your level of cynicism)
  • Google needs help with finding high quality content
    • Freshness of sites
    • incoming links to sites
    • Keywod density
    • and so on
  • Your role as SEO: Guiding Google – NOT manipulating
  • The SEO cycle aligns itself only when SEOs give Google what USERs are looking for
  • Black Hat vs. White Hat –> We did this (!), because it WORKED
    • Black Hat is becoming a thing of the past
    • Even BBC got slapped for bad links by Google
  • Getting slapped by Google –> doesn’t tickle, feels more like getting hit by Rocky
    • Revenue drops by 85% possible
  • The Death of Algorithm Manipulation – Ask your SEO what he will be doing when he works for you

What SEO should look like

  • Keyword Density is not an absolute percentage. Best percentage: Whatever comes out of a GOOD writer
  • How do you know if you’re breaking the rules?
    Ask yourself how you would feel sitting in a room with Sergey and Larry. Would you feel bad? Not a good sign
  • Chasing the algorithm is futile
  • Give Google what they want and you can ignore the algorithms & filters
  • Search Results are going to be flooded with Advertisements in the future
    But: Organic listings may have become a platform for ad delivery; this does not devalue the results!

Realism

  • “But I have a really clever idea! Google will never figure this out” – Nope. Google has 1000s of really clever engineers
  • “(not provided)” will kill keyword data ==> http://www.notprovidedcount.com/
  • “(do not track)” will kill keyword data
  • You can get slapped without being aware of having done anything wrong
  • Punishing the innocent happens

It’s all (mostly) about keywords

  • One keyword per page
  • Long tail is your friend (3 or more words – HitTail anyone?)

The Keyword Research Process

  1. Brainstorm (pen & paper)
  2. Analytics
  3. Competition
  4. Keyword research tool
  5. Identify primary keyword
  6. Identify support keywords
  7. Analytics (existing keywords)
    1. Determine time spend on site for existing keywords —> short = bad
  8. Analysis
  9. Decision: Optimise page (risk breaking it) or create new page

Tips for Keyword Research

  • Activate Keyword suggestions in Google Keyword Tool
  • What you want: Low Competition, Many monthly searches
  • KPI:  [Number of searches] ^ 2 / [Competition]
  • Sort by KPI (highest to lowest)
  • Write content with the keywords; make content read naturally
  • Use “Related Keywords” from the SERP for your main keyword

It is also about content

  • “This is the part where you pretend to add value”
  • NOT just any content – high-quality, enjoyable content
  • Also: Reputation & Authority
  • Links are still important

The Biggest Secret

  • Write REALLY GOOD content that is WORTH READING and SHARING
  • Google only knows, what you tell it!

Random tips

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