- Duration: 39 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KJR1S4TGG40VVERP0XAPSN89 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01KJR1S4TGG40VVERP0XAPSN89)
Transcript
[Nina Lea]: I drove home from the airport yesterday and I thought, oh my god, it’s Monday tomorrow. I’m in work and I just happen to have the busiest Monday ever. But because my flight was Saturday, I just obviously didn’t think. I thought I’d have that day in between. I’m glad everybody was able to get home safely. [Craig Swerdloff]: It’s crazy, I mean, the flights, what’s happening. Lots of flights are being cancelled all around the world. I know. [Nina Lea]: My younger sister is an air hostess for British Airways and she was meant to be in Dubai, that’s her regular flight path, but it got changed last minute to Bermuda, and I’m glad it did, because all the girls that are her friends in Dubai, no one can fly out, so scary times. Yeah, for sure. [Craig Swerdloff]: Well, Michael, at some point, we should talk about your friend Tyler and Beehive and their well-put relationship. Well yeah do you guys have an open line or what’s the what’s the deal there I know we don’t I suspect it well there’s a long story there but we don’t need to focus on it now but I can tell you after if you have extra time yeah for sure I’m happy to you know happy to he’s a good guy he’s an investor yeah I invested And we just sort of became friends. [Michael Houck]: We’ve both done these IRL retreats for founders before, and so we were just jamming on doing one together, and it finally worked out timing-wise. So it was like five days. We got together like 10 founders, everyone super legit, and just kind of went off the grid, just very candid conversations. And just little, we didn’t do like a hackathon, but we sort of hacked some little stuff together and just shared knowledge back and forth. And it was really a great time. I’m paying for it a little bit today with the jet lag, but it’s all right. [Nina Lea]: Yeah, I thought that was beautiful though in Costa Rica. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think I’m gonna post some photos in the newsletter tomorrow. We should get them back for our videographer tonight. [Nina Lea]: But I’ll turn it over to Nina Are we waiting on Emma, or should we just dive in? [Michael Houck]: She’s in the process of moving house, so I’m leaving her to it. [Nina Lea]: I was like, that’s hectic in itself. [Michael Houck]: Go ahead, then, and take a leap from our side. Yeah, of course. [Nina Lea]: Well, yeah, Craig, I just wanted to catch up, really. With all of our clients, obviously, we chat over Slack, and then time passes, and it’s like, to have these regular face-to-faces, well, as best as we can over, you know, Google. But yeah, I just wanted to see how you are, how you’re finding things. Talk to me. [Craig Swerdloff]: Yeah, so last month I guess we, I was talking about, you know, potentially putting the campaign on pause because I wasn’t seeing the sort of bottom funnel, you know, in terms of like, whatever, traffic, clicks, advertiser leads, publisher leads, et cetera. You know, and you guys convinced me that this was a simmer and that it needed to continue to boil, that it needed to cook. And so we agreed to leave it going another month and then reconnect a month from there. Now, or months from then, which I think is now, to just check in and see, you know, how the campaign was, or how things were performing. So, how are things performing? Yeah, of course. [Nina Lea]: I’ll share my screen and go through everything, but 100%. Yeah, we’re still very early stage, so like every dollar matters. [Craig Swerdloff]: Yeah, which I get a 100% business perspective. [Nina Lea]: One of the things, right? [Craig Swerdloff]: I get the need to do what we’re doing and I get the investment in long term. But like, you know, being a startup, sometimes it’s hard because you have to protect your cash as much as possible while balancing the need for long term investment. And unlike Tyler Beehive, I haven’t raised 30 million dollars, so I don’t have the luxury of making very many long-term bets, right? So I’ve got a, every dollar has to count. Yeah, I get it. [Nina Lea]: That’s absolutely fine. Well, we’ve put together a, let me share my screen. We have put together some stats and a report of where we currently were in February. We’ve kept it pretty high level because I know from your perspective, it’s about the numbers, it’s about the progress that’s actually been made and it’s my screenshot been okay? [Craig Swerdloff]: Oh yeah and one other thing I should mention is that since we met last we did give you guys access to Google Analytics as well. Yeah. And so I’d love to know how that’s being utilized and you know what sort of access to reporting that gives us the measured performance. [Nina Lea]: Yeah of course well straight up this screenshot here is from Google Search Console which is from the Google Access that we’ve got from you guys so um that straight away gives us separate access to the other software that we were initially using so the more access the better because that just means we can dig into every little bit of data possible so appreciate that um from your side but um from high level numbers for February it’s real click growth which is fantastic so months over months last month was just 173 clicks which was up 115 over January and 31.3 thousand impressions so that was up 12.35 thousand which is brilliant and then you had 176 keywords totaling at that 352 increase of 176 new keywords shows that Google has expanded your topical footprint significantly. So you are growing, you are kind of ranking higher. The average position at the minute is nine on Google, well 9.3 to be exact, but average position is nine. So that’s kind of the super high level kind of where we’re currently at in February. And basically what that means is that the strategy shift we’ve taken towards click growth over impressions, I know that was a conversation that we had about a month ago, was seeing that click through rates, is it seeing that grow over the high number of impressions but ultimately you were like that doesn’t necessarily mean anything to you, you want to see that click growth right. So that isn’t just more visibility, that’s actual traffic moving, so that’s real people real traffic and real kind of a great increase, which is brilliant to see. Following that conversation a month ago, so if we move into the keywords you’re actually ranking for, so newsletter sponsorship is the highest keyword at the minute, which is brilliant. You’re ranking number nine and for that to be the strongest out of all of them, it you know it signals that Google now views Whirlpool as a credible source in this category and it’s really important because that newsletter sponsorship being number nine is your highest commercial intent term, it’s category defining so you know it says exactly what it is on the tin and it’s also revenue kind of adjacent from your side of things as well. So that being your highest keyword out of all of these is fantastic and we’ll continue to see these grow and you’ll be on page one higher and more frequently which is brilliant. So yeah, just kind of go over what I’ve just said. So your already kind of one top ten win is your highest value keyword. Your broader newsletter commercial cluster, you know, deep consistent indexing which is exactly what we need, but before kind of the link building phase that we’re going to enter soon. And then when we talk about AI, you’re performing really well on AI. It’s super strong. So you’ve had So people are talking about you, you are relevant. And it’s a 74% positive sentiment because there’s no point being spoken about a million times if all they’re talking about is a load of rubbish about you. So everyone’s saying really things and you’re visible on AI as well which you know as AI expands and it’s becoming more and more of everyone’s day-to-day life. I was with my mum in the States last week and she is like not with the times at all. I’m always trying to explain things to her and even she’s using AI these days which is kind of mind-blowing to me and so everyone’s using AI. It’s becoming more and more of a thing rather than kind of the Google searches so Is she using it to search for newsletter sponsorships? Yeah, so, you know, it’s really becoming the tool that people are going to, even over Google, just to kind of quick easy answers to things. So, you know, you are being searched on AI. And what is interesting to me as well is that they’re all commercial topics it’s not informational fluff so we can see kind of the source of where these are coming from and this shows that they’re relevant searches you know they aren’t just so so for example I know we joke about my mom searching but she but she’s not the relevant customer whereas the people that are searching you are which is which is great and then back to the search console high I know you touched on, you gave us access to your Google Analytics, which is great. So your keywords, like I said, were up 176 and you’ve got really strong domination on desktop way over mobile, which for me really kind of speaks that again, it’s a relevant audience, you know, for B2B desktop dominance is expected as well as, you know, it’s dominant on a Thursday and Friday. So that speaks to me that it’s people in the office. On a desktop computer rather than the average kind of consumer on their phone. So that speaks to me that you are reaching the right audience. And over huge, huge numbers, the relevance of your audience is the main thing. And I think HOT can vouch for that as well. There’s no point having thousands and thousands of clicks if none of them are relevant and are gonna get you that lead. It has to be the right audience. So it might take time. To build up the numbers, but as long as the pool of people we’re reaching are relevant to you, that’s what matters. If we came to you with huge numbers straight away, we wouldn’t be doing our job properly because we’re just reaching anyone and everyone, and that isn’t going to benefit you in terms of conversion, whereas, you know, targeting the correct people will. So everything that we’re doing is reaching the right audience, which is brilliant. And again, keywords and movements is fantastic. And then the next opportunity, you know, we’ve made improvements from our last conversation, which I’ll go through in a moment. But where we’re looking to kind of move forward is kind of against your competitors. So we’re going to content around Beehive, around Substack and you know we are ranking for them keywords but we do need more and that is what is going to help us. So that’s kind of where we’re looking to move forwards in the next month or so if you are willing to do so. I’m really put well put directly into the buyer’s journey and and that is exactly what we’re hoping to do. So the deliverables we have completed in February, so the content that we delivered, so 14 articles in total, 10 of those were new articles, three were sponsorship-focused articles, one event-aligned article, because I know we spoke about events on our previous call, and then six newsletter posts we updated to improve rankings, keep that content fresh, and internal linking as well. We made it technical and CRO improvements, you know, so updated core funnel pages. So this part I feel like goes under the radar a little bit. When I speak to clients, it’s all about the content that we’re producing and pushing out, but the technical work we’re currently doing to your site, I think, you know, does need to be spoke about more. [Craig Swerdloff]: Do you have like, Nina, do you have like of some of the changes that were made to the site? Yeah, of course. [Nina Lea]: We’ve put together a full deep dive of everything that we’ve done here. So this links to the report that we’ve just done. So for example, link building completed. So we’ve got the target URL, which should just be your homepage, the article title, and then the link as well. So we’ve got that in terms of link building. The published sponsorship focus blog posts are all linked there, and I’ve explained exactly why they’re important if I go down. So metadata optimization across key pages. So we’ve rewritten a few titles across Meta’s core pages, adjusted some wording, included some keywords, in there to kind of boost your domain authority and it strengthens that click-through rate appeal as well. So again, higher click-through rate, more clicks, stronger ranking signals, aligns all on-site elements with your target keyword strategy. So making sure that everything’s aligned with how we want to move forward. So we’ve been updating past content as well, which is really great for kind of SEO as well. So on your homepage, we’ve added some, some sponsorship focused H1, which is header one, and revised your value proposition. So again, just altering some wording, improved scalability. So you know, so when you go on your website, you can kind of easily see what you guys are about, and reduced that cognitive load. So lots of, so lots of small changes here. Drive and click growth, what else have we got on here? So conversion improvements on your funnel pages. So we’ve got lots of changes basically to different pages here. Event aligned SEO content, that’s linked here. So in terms of the changes we’ve made on your website, we’ve bullet pointed everything here. And that, again, will help with kind of your rankings, because we’ve included them keywords and built that into your site as well, which is one thing that I will say. Let me just find, where have you gone? You’ve gone back. Back here somewhere. There you are. My visual board on the back, don’t mind that. Let me just stop sharing my screen, which is one thing I always say. So in terms of creating new content, and obviously that’s important with how we’re driving forward, One thing I do think is special about what we provide from an SEO perspective is going back to old content, refreshing that in terms of keywords, making changes to your website. And obviously, we want you to stay with us for as long as physically possible. But the work that we do stays with you. Whereas if you run a paid ad, you’ll see results instantly. But then the second you turn that off, the results also go. Whereas everything we’re doing, I know we spoke about the long term and investment and stuff that everything we do sticks with you and compounds over time. So the changes we’ve made last month are gonna stay with you and compound as you move forward. So yeah, I’ll send both of them through on Slack and you can have a read through them, have a bit of a deep dive yourself into the changes and things like that. But do you have any questions at this point, Craig? [Craig Swerdloff]: Yeah, so a couple of things. One, I was confused about the average ranking because it said 9.3 but then if I looked at the top 20 keywords that you put on that in that document only one of them was was nine or below everything else was was much higher yeah I’m just wondering if we’re indexing low for keywords that for other keywords that are less relevant like I’m just not sure what that how that works yeah okay well I’ll do is I’ll send through a list of the of like everything that you are ranking for kind of in that top 10. [Nina Lea]: We’ve sent through the ones that are super relevant to you at that stage, but I can definitely send that over so you can see exactly what else is coming up kind of in that top 10 that kind of creates that nine average. We’ve just included the ones that are most relevant to you, but absolutely, let me make a note of that. I’ll send that over. [Michael Houck]: Nina, I think it might be good. Me for Craig to see like what are the keywords that we’re ranking particularly well for versus what are the ones that we’re struggling with so we’ll see we’ll see sort of where we have the advantage now versus where we might want to put emphasis uh going forward yeah and how we want to grow forward 100 I can get that over um quite quickly to you I after this call that’s not a problem and that’s definitely kind of an opportunity gap we can we can talk about Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Craig Swerdloff]: The other thing is, I think that mostly the people that are interested in newsletter sponsorships are publishers, not advertisers. [Craig Swerdloff]: And so I definitely am seeing a lot of publisher and leads coming through, which is great. [Craig Swerdloff]: But what I really want to see and what really drives our business is actually advertisers coming to the website. And I suspect that most advertisers are not searching for newsletter sponsorships, they probably don’t even know what newsletter sponsorships are. [Craig Swerdloff]: And so more often than not, what they’re searching for is like performance marketing, you know, new marketing channels or channels similar to podcasts or, you know what I mean? Like they’re searching for things that in the context of their job, not necessarily specifically newsletters. [Nina Lea]: I agree with that, I agree with that and an example I’ll give is that one of my clients is a dentist and they want to rank for dental crowns but they’re currently ranking for emergency dentist or I’m in pain and it’s like they don’t know the service that you provide. I don’t have a toothache and think okay I need a crown, I just know that I’m in pain and need to go go to the dentist. So I like that thinking of, you know, people don’t know that you’re what they need. So we need to kind of spin that on its head and think about different keywords and the target. I like that thinking we can definitely do that. [Craig Swerdloff]: Um, they also might be searching if they’re an advertiser for like specific verticals. So like they might be searching for, um, health and wellness newsletters. Yeah. But they’re not going to search for newsletter sponsorship generically. Just it’s unlikely. It’s mostly going to be publishers who are like, how do I make more money? Because I’m, I’m not getting enough ads from beehive or my, my, my current platform. Yeah. Uh, so I think it’s really important for the sustainability of this program that we focus more of our effort on the demand side and less on the support side. Supply side. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: The good news with that is that a lot of the foundational stuff that we’ve done both with on the technical side and with the the backlinks and things like that, that stuff and the authority building, that’s going to translate no matter what you were going after. So that’s foundational. But I agree. I think if that is the focus, if that is where if that’s going to make that sort of the most the best ROI for you guys on this, then absolutely. Nina, let’s shift focus to be more about the advertisers than the publishers. And we can jam. I mean, Craig, obviously, we’ll love your input there. We can chat more even on this call with the last few minutes. But Nina, you and I and Emma should probably get on a little brainstorm, I guess, tomorrow when she’s back from moving. And we can strategize some approaches there. [Nina Lea]: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, we can definitely do that. And I like that approach of moving forward. In fact, we’ve built a strong foundation and it’s now what we do to kind of increase that foundation and kind of propel us forward. So no, I, I like that thinking. [Craig Swerdloff]: Um, Michael, we have the opposite problem with beehive, which is to say that, like, I have more supply than I can fill. Um, my challenge is that there’s never enough demand. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, you guys, you guys have the stronger like structure though. I mean, like, I mean, between us, you know, like, Tyler’s my homie, uh, but i’ve always i’ve never used their sponsorship network because the payouts are just not sustainable it’s all like the It’s just not set up. I think in a way that that values the brand that some publishers have it values sort of the Massive distribution that you can get across all the newsletters that they that they have at the lowest cost basically so, um, I I think that that focusing on the advertisers is probably the smartest thing to do. Because my guess is that a lot of them are getting the distribution they want, but maybe not the engagement or returns that they want. No, for sure. [Craig Swerdloff]: They’re definitely not getting the performance that they want. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So we’re always in need of more demand. And the more demand we have, the more publishers will come to wealth. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, I will get so. [Craig Swerdloff]: And Michael, to your point, like ours is a democratic system in terms of pricing. So the best newsletters automatically rise to the top in terms of the CPC rates they get offered. We don’t we don’t have like a flat CPC rate. Everybody gets paid the same. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s that’s been one of my one of my critiques to him for a bit and why we’ve sort of avoided it. But I love that. Yeah, I mean look, you know, I I think that the the sort of positioning in the cell is is relatively straightforward I think we can talk through with them and just make sure that she’s aligned but um Yeah, I feel pretty confident that we can we can spin some things up and and make an impact there 100 so I’ll send a week. [Nina Lea]: I’ll send the um documents that i’ve just Run through over on slack and if you’ve got any questions on that just fire that back and we can get back to you on that and then once you’ve caught up with Emma, we’ll send through kind of a proposition of how to move forward. And I’ll also send over the kind of keyword gap of what you are ranking for that kind of makes up that 9.3 average. And again, we could like tie that in with our strategy. And I think, I think that’s gonna be really positive. [Craig Swerdloff]: And then Michael, put on your mute, put on your earmuffs for a second. Nina, the other thing is like Beehive is spending a ton of money on market And so they’re out there educating the universe of advertisers on like what newsletter sponsorships are. We really need to be buying keywords and focusing on stuff like, you know, here, how, you know, well put versus Beehive, like how we do it differently. Because there are a lot of advertisers who are introduced to newsletter sponsorships via Beehive. Who get on that sales call and they go, that’s weird. Like they don’t show them who the publishers are. Right. It’s all blind. There’s no transparency. They’re paying a single flat CPC rate across all publishers. Um, it’s a large investment. So there’s a lot of reasons why an advertiser would be introduced to newsletter sponsorships through beehive, but then pull back and be like, that, that doesn’t make sense for me. I wonder if there are other solutions. Yeah. And that you are. That maybe are transparent and don’t have huge minimum budgets and who are more about optimization and performance. And so when people like an advertiser searches for beehive competitors, that’s where we want to be. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let them burn the VC dollars on educating the market. And then you guys come in with the more sophisticated kind of solution for what these advertisers actually want. I think that makes a lot of sense and we can we can tailor the content that way. And as an investor in Beehive, I said none of that. [Craig Swerdloff]: I mean, I see, well, it’s like we’re like a DSP in the programmatic ad space. So we represent the advertisers and we’re really good at making their money work. Whereas Beehive is really an SSP. But, you know, there is no programmatic DSP ad solution. So they’re having to go sell to advertisers directly, but that’s not their DNA. Their DNA is they’re a publisher, newsletter creator business, servicing those people and servicing the advertisers. [Craig Swerdloff]: And frankly, I’m going to go after all of the beehive advertisers who I see, you know, advertising with beehive and then stopping because I know they’re stopping because I know why they’re stopping. They’re stopping because it didn’t work. And so I want to reach them and I’d like them to know who we are when I reach out, right? Because they’ve read about us somewhere else. Or at a minimum. [Michael Houck]: like ideally have seen you before, but at a minimum be able to quickly do a search and get the right information. [Craig Swerdloff]: I think Cave does a really good job, and I’ve said this before, they have like, you know, paved versus, you know, beehive or paved versus, you know, they have literally like a hundred pages on them versus, then they rank really, really high on all their search in Geo. And so we should kind of replicate what they’ve done as much as possible. And then the other final thing is like, I’m posting on LinkedIn like three times a week about performance marketing and newsletter sponsorships. And I know you guys are, I’m sharing my newsletter with you before it goes out and you guys are making some modifications and whatever. You know, if there are topics that I’m writing about on LinkedIn that you think would also be helpful for content on the website, right? We can repurpose any of those LinkedIn posts into blog content. [Nina Lea]: I love repurposing content. That’s my favorite thing. I feel like if you’ve already done it, like, come on, let’s make the most out of it, like 100%. Let’s do a deep dive, Nina. [Michael Houck]: Let’s see what we can pull out from the past few months and see if it makes sense to explore, especially like high-performing posts. OK, well, Craig, we’ll get at it. We’ll send everything out. Over and I’ll chat with Emma on strategy and we’ll shift things towards the advertiser side and get that rolling for you. Okay, sounds good. [Craig Swerdloff]: Go ahead. [Michael Houck]: Talk to you soon. Good to see you. You too. Thanks, guys. Take care.