Remote Marketing Podcast: Recent Episodes
Madhav Bhandari
Get an inside look into how companies/individuals run early-stage marketing. Hosted by Madhav Bhandari, an experienced technology marketer who led several SaaS companies grow from $100k to $10M ARR.
We also wrote a short 14-page book for founders about growth learnings while taking a SaaS company to $4 million ARR. Get your copy here: https://www.earlystagemarketer.com/4-million
I had a wonderful chat with Andrew Capland (former Director @ Wistia) on his journey of becoming a full-time mentor. How it all started, his mentoring process, and why mentoring has been an incredible learning experience for him. You can reach Andrew on DeliveringValue.co
944 days. That's how long it took us to get to special episode number 50! It's been a memorable journey delivering content for all of you. 🎉 I wrote a short 14-page book for founders about growth learnings while taking a SaaS company to $4 million ARR. To celebrate today's special episode, you can get your copy for free: https://www.earlystagemarketer.com/4-million
This is a clip from a podcast episode I did in 2016 - when Hubstaff had crossed $2M ARR. Today, Hubstaff is a leading time tracking software that's at $15M+ ARR. This episode highlights some of my key learnings during the early stages of a startup's life.
To be a great leader, focus on your mindset. In this episode, I talked about reframing your current thoughts by identifying common cognitive distortions.
What I absolutely love about Kevan is not just his illustrious career as a marketing lead, but the fact that he's constantly shared his learnings along the journey. A small part of that is his Substack newsletter which he's converted into a revenue-generating side hustle. In this episode, we dive deep into his Substack business.
Hi, I'm Madhav Bhandari. I started the Remote Marketing Podcast 2 years ago. In this episode, I shared my story and background. You can connect with me on LinkedIn You can join my bi-annual newsletter here If you're interested to consult with me, please email me on madhav [at] remotemarketing [dot] org You can read my blogs at remotemarketing.org and madhavb.com *This episode was reproduced from an earlier recording on Everything Is Marketing Podcast (hosted by Corey Haines)
I had an insightful conversation with my CEO a couple of months ago and my notes from that call became this episode. Are you struggling with moving forward with a marketing initiative? Are you out of ideas for a new channel? Are you unclear about the way forward for a strategy? Happens to everybody. This episode is a reminder on why getting on the phone with people is so important.
There are so many marketers that dream of becoming entrepreneurs someday but fall into the "I don't have a tech co-founder" or "struggle with monetisation" trap. A year after leaving his job at Baremetrics, Corey's built a tech business that makes $3k MRR without writing a single line of code. In this episode, Corey shares his learnings from his 1 year old entrepreneurial journey.
Affiliate recruitment is one of the two key pieces to make your program successful (the other one being optimizing the performance of existing affiliates). I've been tackling this piece for the last couple of months and spoke to a bunch of affiliate experts about this. In this episode, I'll share some ideas that you can implement TODAY to scale affiliate recruitment for your program.
We had an insightful chat with LiquidWeb's Director of Affiliate Marketing about the ins and outs of managing a large affiliate program. Saralyn's been an affiliate marketer for almost a decade and she's worked with best of the best. We talked about building an affiliate marketing team, recruiting top 1% affiliates at scale and improving the performance of existing affiliates.
We spoke with Dustin Howes (former affiliate lead @ WP Engine) on acquiring affiliates at scale. It's a well known fact that top 20% affiliates bring in 80% of customers. In this episode, we chat through Dustin's learnings on acquiring these top 20% affiliates at scale.
I've been doing Year-in-Reviews for over 4 years now and they've proven much more effective to me than New Year Resolutions. This episode will give you a template to do your own Year-in-Review, irrespective of if you're an individual or a business. This is an encore episode first released in 2019. Also, here's my 2020 in review: https://madhavb.com/2020-review/
I spoke with Michael Gutman who's an affiliate marketing consultant and former Director of Marketing at Flexjobs. In this episode, Michael reflected on his top learnings from growing Flexjobs popular affiliate program.
In this episode, I shared how I write a remote job description, my method to find the right salary range for a role and shared our actual application process. This episode is great for anyone who's planning to hire for a new role or expanding their team.
I started looking for a Head of SEO at Bonsai earlier this year and Alex Birch (today's guest) ended up being that person. We chatted about internal linking - why it's important, best practices, how to scale it, internal linking examples from famous companies (like Canva) that achieved hockey-stick growth doing it well.
Tip - I was a big Wordpress advocate until I came across Webflow a year ago. I love it because it allows us to make SEO changes at scale (like internal linking) programmatically without any help from devs.
Bonuses are a great tool to create high performance teams. Bonuses also happen to be one of the most desired job perks for most remote workers. In this episode, I shared my top learnings from designing bonuses for my remote teammates.
I chatted with Andrew about his journey with Churn.fm - how he started the podcast, operations behind every episode and how he manages to publish an episode every Wednesday without fail (despite having a full time job + family life + new startup). Insightful episode if you're thinking of building a podcast. Notes - https://remotemarketing.org/podcasting-tips/
If you're a business that's investing deeply in SEO, managing a content team is a big part of it. I invited Ilia Markov to talk about building a team of writers and managing them based on his decade long experience as a blog editor.
1/5 of remote workers are actively struggling with loneliness while working remotely. It's time to find a long term solution.Â
Notes & spreadsheet link - https://remotemarketing.org/lonely-remote-worker/
I didn't want to do link-building in-house, so I started looking for a good, affordable & reliable link builder. This episode documents ALL my research. Full list of link-building services - https://remotemarketing.org/link-building-services/
VP of Marketing at Hotjar (100% remote), Typeform, GetApp... the list is endless for Sançar. We chatted about the common issues that Heads of Marketing face - from managing expectations of CEOs to managing your marketing budget like an investment portfolio. Insightful conversation! Notes - https://remotemarketing.org/marketing-leader-traits/
Freshbooks has tripled their organic traffic in the last 18 months. So I invited Steve Toth (their ex-SEO manager) to understand how they manage their SEO budget. If SEO is a big growth channel for you, you'll find this episode insightful. Notes - https://remotemarketing.org/seo-budget/
In this special episode, I got Rand Fishkin (founder of Sparktoro & Moz) to share his top learnings after completing two decades in marketing. We also geeked out on marketing flywheels. Notes - https://remotemarketing.org/marketing-flywheel/
In this episode, I shared how to write an industry report, how to promote it and pros and cons of industry reports as part of your content marketing strategy.
Some industry reports I've worked on in the last 3 years:Â
- https://blog.hubstaff.com/2017-freelancing-trends/
- https://www.hellobonsai.com/covid-19-study
- https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/
In 2015, my biggest challenge while coaching new hires was when I had to re-answer the same questions again and again (esp. if it was a process-driven role). Add to that the challenges of coaching team members spread across timezones. This episode talks about how I fixed that and how to coach new remote hires today.
Over the years, I've created a marketing budget template that's straight-forward, easy to implement and great for new marketing leaders/founders/CEOs who’re looking to create their first marketing budget. In this episode, I explain how to build a marketing budget using that template.
A lot of professional networking opportunities have diluted in this time due to cancelled conferences/meetups etc. On the other hand, I've been networking remotely for a decade now so I decided to share my experience. Blog post - https://remotemarketing.org/remote-networking/
In this episode, I cover high-level planning for marketing teams and why NOW is the perfect time to do it. My notes - https://madhavb.com/marketing-strategic-thinking/
In this episode, I cover project management with remote marketing teams. If you recently transitioned to a remote team because of Covid-19, the next couple of episodes are aimed at make this transition easier. #TogetherAtHome
If you're a business with a decent email list (>1000) and looking to get more out of your free subscribers, you need to listen to this episode. I shared my experience with "subscriber onboarding emails" and how it generates $20k/mo for one of my clients. Try my preferred email marketing tool (free) - https://remotemarketing.org/recommends/convertkit/
Want to build a long term marketing strategy? Make sure you spend 20% of your time on new marketing experiments all year long. In this episode, I shared the marketing experimentation process that I use with my team.
I got Wesley again on the show to talk about increasing your revenue as an affiliate partner. If you run a blog with a sizeable audience, I talked to Wesley about tactics to boost earnings as an affiliate in the short and long term.
It’s a lot harder to stand out in the world today. Especially if you’re trying to market your product to a very tech savvy audience. Sometimes going in the opposite direction (where everybody is going) feels like a breath of fresh air. In this episode, I make a case for that with real life examples of B2B brands doing that.
I spoke with remote affiliate marketer Wesley Whetten about the foundational structure of a good affiliate program, when does it make sense and if it can be set up with a remote marketing team. High-level notes here - https://remotemarketing.org/create-affiliate-program/
In this episode, I spoke with Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo about the common challenges any early CMO faces and how to push past those. We also discussed Ahrefs's remote marketing team setup and their playbook. High level notes - https://remotemarketing.org/tim-soulo-ahrefs/
I've been doing Year-in-Reviews for over 4 years now and they've proven much more effective to me than New Year Resolutions. This episode will give you a template to do your own Year-in-Review, irrespective of if you're an individual or a business.
Most leadership positions require you to collaborate cross-functionally across many departments. And if you’re going to work with many departments, you need to be skilled at managing your stakeholders properly so your projects get executed without much friction.  In this episode, I'm going to share a practical approach of managing internal stakeholders, especially in a remote team setup.
ConvertKit makes $19m annually with a 100% distributed team and a third of their revenue comes from affiliates. I uncovered some insights from Alexis who's been running their affiliate marketing program since 2016. High-level notes - https://remotemarketing.org/convertkit-affiliate/
Looking to leverage your employee's networks to increase product awareness? That's exactly why you need an employee advocacy strategy. This episode summarises all my research when building out an employee advocacy program on a $0 budget.
In the last couple of years, I’ve seen rebrands of almost all products I use (Google, Uber, Slack, WeWork etc.). I've even seen rebrands happen at two of the companies I worked with (Hubstaff & Close). If you've ever wondered why companies rebrand and when should you consider your own company rebrand, this episode is for you.
Every one today talks about cold emails. You have 100s of “guides” released every day to answer the question – how to cold email folks the right way? The problem is that there is no right way. You've gotten access to someone’s email through whatever medium and are now emailing them without any prior history. That’s why, over the years, I’ve become a huge believer in the power of warm emails.
In this special two-part episode, I spoke with Doist's Head of Marketing on her journey from #1 marketing hire to marketing lead. Part 1 covered how Brenna built her remote marketing team from scratch and gives an inside look into Doist's marketing journey so far. Part 2 covers how she manages her team, how she's growing herself as a leader and her advice to non-remote marketing teams.
In this special two-part episode, I spoke with Doist's Head of Marketing on her journey from #1 marketing hire to marketing lead. Part 1 covers how Brenna built her remote marketing team from scratch and gives an inside look into Doist's marketing journey so far. Part 2 covers how she manages her team, how she's growing herself as a leader and her advice to non-remote marketing teams.
Remote marketing teams became possible because of technology catching up. With the internet and a plethora of collaboration tools available, you can work with your team as easily from your home as your office. In today's episode, I share the 6-7 tools without which we won't be able to run our remote marketing team.
In today's short episode, I settle the age old debate on when to hire a generalist vs a specialist. TLDR; hire a generalist if you’re early stage, hire a specialist as you become a mature and large business.
Part 1 talked about what is "honeypot marketing" and considerations to make when building your own honeypot product. In this episode, I talk about growing a honeypot product and monetising it to generate leads/customers for your main product.
On my search for a long term marketing channel, I stumbled upon this beautiful strategy of using "honeypots" to generate leads for your main product. In this two-episode special, I talked about how we built our own honeypot called Hubstaff Talent, our thinking behind it, the pitfalls we avoided and how we made it a revenue generating automatic growth channel for us.
Pricing changes are important for ALL software companies, but they're also tricky to roll out. Why? Because you could potentially lose a big chunk of your customers to your competitors. In this episode, I talk about the 4 steps you should take to ensure a smooth rollout of new pricing for your customers and your business.
Your growth curve isn't really a 'curve' anymore and rather flat. Your revenue isn't growing. You're out of ideas. In this episode, I talk about some common strategies B2B companies use to expand their market & grow their revenue over the long term:
If you're looking to make your company go partially or 100% remote, you need to make all company processes "remote-first". I had the unique opportunity to hear two perspectives on this –  one with the CEO of an 80 people company and the other with the only remote employee at a start-up.Â
My mission is to enable all co-located marketing teams to be location independent and this podcast will be one of the enablers. In this episode, I talked about why I decided to take up this mission.