On this episode I talk with Liam Martin from timedoctor.com (project management for remote employees) and staff.com (employee productivity within larger enterprises) about how he has grown his SaaS companies through content marketing & remote workers.
We discuss…
This episode is sponsored by Ahrefs – find out how to win a free annual subscription below.
Liam has 4 different departments for his content marketing & search strategy.
- Writing team with half a dozen writers with an editor that has a lot of SEO knowledge. The writers each have a keyword to focus the article around and every quarter Liam and the SEO editor will sit down and figure out which keywords to next go after using Ahrefs based on if they think can rank top 3. The writers have a bounty on each keyword. Writers need to have a portfolio and prove can write before allowed on the blog. Each keyword has at least 3000 searches a month. The editor makes SEO tweaks.
- Whilst the article is in the queue to be published they have Researchers that have to find 500 emails of people they can reach out about the piece. They go into the SERPs for the main keyword as well as 10 or so secondary attached keywords and grab emails of the top 20. They then find emails of everyone that has linked to those top 20. the emails are contextual “You linked to X article and think you should link to us as better”.
- Launch (linker) team that email out those 500 over the first month. Then wait 2 months and see if ranking. If 50th need to try again and add more content or contact more people and it heads back to the launch queue. If, however, they are 5th to 9th and think can be top 3 then send to mop up team.
- Mop up (linker) team spends 3-6 months working on long term link building for particular keywords that they know are reliably converting and generating revenue. It takes them 8 email exchanges on Buzzstream with other SEOs on complementary sites before getting a link. They also do guest posts who collaborate with what the writers are focussed on to get page level links.
Every linker has a quota that they must meet. Every month they give out bonus to who got highest domain rating (DR) link and then who got the highest cumulative domain authority rating.
They don’t go after or count any link below DR30. Their quota is around 600 cumulative DR per month for a full-time link builder.
The above process enables them to get links for $50 a pop in a true white hat way which is obviously far cheaper than considering paying for a link building service.
They did offer guest posts on timedoctor.com however found out that guest posters were emailing people selling links which is obviously against Google’s ToS so now only offer spots to people they trust.
ADs strategy
They do paid ads if there is a positive ROI but they are not reliant on that as they don’t pay the same dividends as search.
After you’re ranked first then people start linking to you as they are lazy and these are often from smaller DR sites.
We talked about his remote workforce and use of co-working spaces.
I mentioned coworker.com and Liam mentioned remoteyear.com.
Check out his conference runningremote.com in Bali in June if you’re building remote teams and reach out to him on twitter.
Thanks to AHREFS for sponsoring this episode.
