How the Fxck - No BS marketing strategy: Recent Episodes
Ben Goodey
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We interview creative leaders about the methods behind their marketing success. No frills, no vague statements—just honest strategy. How the Fxck is a top 5% marketing podcast for SaaS marketers. Visit www.thefxck.com for summarised insight.
This week, I welcomed Trish Seidel onto the show. Trish is "marketing's big sister" on LinkedIn, where she shares advice on SEO, content strategy and growth.
We discuss:
- Scaling Springly's content to 100 articles per month
- Building content strategies & how to build clusters
- Setting standards for content quality
- Important processes for scaling
- Changing approaches to SEO now she's Head of Content at Djust (with a longer sales cycle)
- AI content—where she's using it
Join the How the F*ck newsletter here.
Learn to produce content at scale in my eBook here.
This week, I welcome Josh Spilker onto the show. Josh is a seasoned marketer, having been the sole or first content person at ClickUp, Friday, and several other venture-back startups.
We discuss:
- Is Josh worried about AI in SEO and content marketing? How will our world change? Is this the end of Google’s dominance?
- How has Josh streamlined his content processes with Open AI tools?
- Taking 2 websites from 0 to 100K traffic/month
- How middle-of-funnel optimization drives growth
- Is there any value to top-of-funnel content?
- Scaling the one-man band: Working with writers to achieve velocity
- How to achieve quality and quantity at scale
- 3 top tips for increasing content quality
- Does Google care about duplicate content?
Join the How the F*ck newsletter here: https://www.thefxck.com
Learn to scale content production in my eBook! https://www.thefxck.com/produce-content-at-scale
"There's no search volume for what we do"—okay, well do THIS instead.
In this case study, Aditya Vempaty (ex-Amplitude, current MoEngage VP of Marketing) shares his story of identifying an underserved segment of a competitive industry and building an SEO-led content strategy to capture it.
In this conversation, we discuss:
- Why you should ignore your competitors.
- Pain points and ‘the need behind the need’.
- How to make SEO a demand creation channel.
- How to tell if your product marketing is focusing on the wrong problem.
- The trick to becoming a ‘no-brainer’ brand.
- The role of AI in SEO
Find Aditya on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityavempaty/
Follow me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamingoodey/
Join the How the F*ck newsletter here: https://www.thefxck.com/
Learn to scale content production in my eBook! https://www.thefxck.com/produce-content-at-scale
We're back, baby! In this episode, I jump on to do my first-ever solo podcast. Just me and you.
I wanted to dig into a challenge my clients and network face regularly: How to craft your first topic cluster.
Your first for a client is so important. I can't stress that enough. It sets the tone and dictates whether SEO and Content will be part of your go-to-market moving forward.
So in this guide, I want to help you choose a topic that with high commercial potential that will also make sure you stand the f*ck out in your industry.
Key Links:
- Over 60 people have now purchased my Scale Package. Learn to dominate your industry with content that converts (and do it fast) right here.
- Join the How the F*ck community to instantly access our premium content and case study library.
—Benny
I was so excited to welcome fellow Brit, Zoe Ashbridge, to the community today.
We throw tips and questions back and forth, discussing best practices around these four topics:
- How to write content that targets a specific keyword
- How to win featured snippets
- How to win HARO links
- How to work efficiently with freelancers (from briefs to workflows)
In the newsletter this week, I’ll round up some of our advice on 1 and 2 and I’ll let you dive into the conversation with Zoe to hear the rest.
Sponsored messages:
OMG. The Scale Package is LIVEEE for pre-order! Grab yours at a discounted price here.
Want a free backlink? Visit the Editorial Link website and book a meeting. Order 5 backlinks to get 1 free, use promo code "Ben Goodey" to get your free links (only pay when links are secured!).
OMG. The Scale Package is LIVEEE for pre-order! Grab yours at a discounted price here.
Benji Hyam and his team at Grow & Convert build SEO strategies that focus on conversion, not traffic.
In this interview, we focus on the case study of Cognitive FX, which is a classic example of how to build a blog full of content that's high-converting, differentiated, and still outranks WebMD.
Benji walks us through pain point SEO, keyword prioritization and his approach to topical authority.
The results speak for themselves: their work has led to 250K monthly organic visitors and drives 50% of all new business for Cognitive FX.
Things You'll Learn:
- How to create a revenue-generating SEO strategy (from customer research to prioritizing keywords)
- How & why Grow & Convert charges $10K for 3 SEO articles
- The power of investing in truly quality content
- How to hire the best of the best writers
“60% of all our content ranks on page one.”—Jessica Lam Hill Young
In this episode, we learn the three-part framework Jess and her team use to create high-quality content that ranks on Google almost every time.
Expect to learn:
- The three-part framework behind content that ranks on page 1
- How to balance self-promotion & helpful content
Where to get subject matter expertise
Listen to part one from Jess here (I wrote my best insights into this article, with best bits from the episode).
Key Links:
- Monday.com Case Study (Part 1)
- Living Cozy Case Study
A big thanks to our sponsors, uSERP (need an ambitious SEO agency? These are your people.) and Ahrefs (the best all-in-one SEO platform). Test out their free tools here: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
Supporting article (free): How to Refresh Old Content for SEO (and what NOT to do)
This week's episode focuses on one of the most powerful tools in the SEO arsenal: content refreshes.
Want to impress your clients or boss? Start revisiting your vast library of content.
Be warned: hockey stick traffic growth awaits.
As you'll hear in the episode, updating old content can take a blog post from 0 to 5,500 monthly visitors in as little as one month.
Expect to Learn:
- What content to update and when
- How to update old content
Read the full article here to learn more about this topic. I offer 8 questions to ask yourself when updating old content and give tips on what not to do.
Key Links:
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Sponsor #1: uSERP (Need an ambitious SEO agency? These are your people.)
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Sponsor #2: Ahrefs (Best all-in-one SEO platform). Test out their free tools here: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
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Grab my SEO brief template - Drive expertise, connection & ranking
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View sh*t loads of awesome case studies in our SEO case study library
Our "raison d’etre" is to help marketers scale search traffic without sacrificing quality. This week, expect a ton of tips & ideas for doing just that.
I interviewed Erin Balsa, who builds thought leadership-driven content strategies for B2B SaaS startups that sell complex, enterprise solutions.
She, like me, has a strong aversion to putting out content that’s not unique and well-sourced. Both of our standards for minimum viable content are pretty damn high.
With the companies she works with, this stuff is critical.
B2B enterprise SaaS is as far from an impulse purchase as you can get. It’s expensive and there are lots of decision-makers involved.
You just can’t get away with cheap or AI-written content when you’re selling something expensive and complex to such a smart audience.
Grab the full case study here (it's a lot more in-depth than the interview).
Expect to Learn:
- How to build quality thought leadership-driven SEO topic clusters (a framework that drove 789 leads/month for me in my last role)
- The “how” behind a research report that drove $680k in closed business for Erin
- Two tips for building thought leadership into a Velocity SEO workflow
Key Links:
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Sponsor #1: Skale B2B SEO Agency
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Sponsor #2: Ahrefs (You know who they are). Test out their free tools here: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
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Sponor #3: uSERP (Need an ambitious SEO agency? These are your people.)
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Grab my SEO brief template - Drive expertise, connection & ranking
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View sh*t loads of awesome case studies in our SEO case study library
Since launch in 2020, copy.ai has grown to 8M users in the fierce battle for AI content writing tools.
But back in 2022, when they began investing in SEO, search volumes for their core keywords (e.g. "AI content generator") were negligible if they existed at all.
Over that year, as we are all well aware, there was a rapid wave in demand for AI copywriting tools.
The team at copy.ai correctly predicted that demand. And as a result, they were the first to build an SEO strategy to capture it.And they won.
Their big money maker? A cluster of tools pages that now brings in way over 150,000 high-intent visitors a month.
In this SEO case study, we look at how copy.ai's SEO strategy helped them seize a first-mover advantage in the emerging category and how they built an SEO moat that they still benefit from today.
Guest: Jeremy Moser the Founder of uSERP.io, which is the Digital PR and Performance SEO agency for copy.ai.
Listen to this episode to find out:
- How Copy.ai gained a first-mover advantage, capitalizing on the AI wave
- How to determine if you have content-intent fit, or your content misses the point
- 5 changes to your
that improved copy.ai’s CTR by 2.1% points. - Where they focused backlink building at copy.ai and 3 key tips for building backlink authority
Full case study teardown here (with video!)
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Key Links:
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Sponsor #1: Workello: https://workello.com/?fpr=howthefck for a platform that helps find, vet, and hire writers at scale
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Sponsor #2: Ahrefs: Ahrefs is my go-to keyword and competitor research, too. Test out their free tools here: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
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Grab my SEO brief template - Drive expertise, connection & ranking
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View sh*t loads of awesome case studies in our SEO case study library
We're joined again this week by Jacob from NerdWallet, this week to discuss a VERY important topic: high-converting keywords.
We discuss:
- What types of keyword drive conversions? (It's not just bottom-of-funnel!)
- How to find high-converting keywords in your niche (Full article contains modifiers to use in your research)
- Why it's important to craft a targeted, compelling offer
- How to build a web page that converts
Key links:
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Sponsor #1: uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
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Grab my SEO brief template - Drive expertise, connection & ranking
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Read the full teardown here.
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View sh*t loads of awesome case studies in our SEO case study library
This case study is about an underdog website.
A new company, launching into a competitive niche and winning some of those most difficult keywords.
Maze broke through on topics like “UX Design” and “UX Design Tools” by focusing on:
- Thorough, well-crafted content
- Superior UI/UX designs
- Scalable link building
- CRO techniques
These are the core tenants of the SEO revenue engine that has allowed Maze to fuel its growth via search.
Listen to this episode to find out:
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The SEO engine companies like Hubspot, MoonPay, UserZoom, PiktoChart and Maze have under the hood, and how to build one yourself.
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How to pioneer your category via search. Winning growth EVEN when no one is searching for what you do.
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How to avoid wasting search visitors. Most traffic reads and leaves, not anymore with this 3-step process.
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A simple yet powerful technique for backlink building that will put you AHEAD of your competitors. Maze did this to beat a powerful competitor.
Note: Got questions? Jake kindly offered How the F*ck listeners a free 15-minute chat to SaaS peeps who wants help implementing this. Book here.
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Sponsors:
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Grab my SEO brief template - Drive expertise, connection & ranking
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Sponsor #1: uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
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Sponsor #2: Workello: https://workello.com/?fpr=howthefck for a platform that helps scale hiring writers
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Read the full teardown here.
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View sh*t loads of awesome case studies in our SEO case study library
Jacob Clarke joined the show today from NerdWallet's stupidly successful SEO team. He helps us define topical authority and drill down into how to achieve it to accelerate growth results.
In SEO, the concept of topical authority is one that's relatively new in our lexicon. But it's one of THE most powerful tools to have in your belt when building an SEO-driven content strategy.
Topics covered: Why prioritize topical authority? Two tried & tested methods for measuring authority. And a step-by-step for building authority.
Key links:
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Reduce time and improve rankings: Get the ultimate SEO brief template
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Sponsor: uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
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Read this in article format
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View sh*t loads of topical authority case studies in our SEO case study library
I had an amazing conversation with Ash Read this week on the show.
For those of you who know the software company Buffer, Ash was their Editorial Director for 6 years. So, you know, this is going to be an episode where you'll about scaling traffic with quality content systems.
Since 2020, Ash has been building a niche blog empire. Starting with LivingCozy.com, which focuses on home & furniture product reviews.
The site received over 335,000 monthly page views in Feb 2023 and earned ~$10K a month this time LAST year.
Expect to learn:
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Living Cozy's initial content strategy and how it's evolved
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Three types of content and why they write them
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Why expertise is so important and how they get it for every article
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How Ash uses "layering" to ship more content quickly
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The ins and outs of Living Cozy's content operation
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Living Cozy's backlink strategy
Sponsors:
-
Mentioned SEO brief template
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Sponsor: uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
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Read this in article format
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View sh*t loads of topical authority case studies in our SEO case study library
Learn about E-E-A-T and how to demonstrate it with SEO expert, Olga Zarr.
Topics: What is E-E-A-T? Does it matter for everyone? How can I demonstrate it to Google?
Key Links:
- Mentioned SEO brief template
- Read this in article format.
- Become a How the F*ck member & unlock 30+ SEO case studies.
Eli Schwartz has advised the who's who of technology companies: Zendesk, Coinbase, Quora, InsightTimer, and many more.
During his 7-year tenure at SurveyMonkey, his growth team of 5 was responsible for 2/3 of their annual revenue. In total, over $1bn in organic value (yes, that includes branded search and content strategy).
"By the time I left, we were generating an average $200 million a year in revenue sourced from organic search."—Eli Schwartz
He systemized his learnings at SurveyMonkey into an approach called Product-led SEO. A methodology used by companies like Canva, Coinbase, Language Drops, and more to drive explosive growth.
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In this episode, we learn all about it:
- The SurveyMonkey Story - $200M in annual organic revenue - $1BN over 7 years he worked there [9:37]
- Inventing product-led SEO at SurveyMonkey [17:26]
- The REAL definition of product-led SEO [19:32 - 24:16]
- How product-led SEO drives revenue. The buyer journey [24:22-28:20]
- Predicting the end of Google’s dominance [31:48]
- Is Product-led SEO for you? [39:40]
- Common mistakes people make with Product-led SEO? [49:28]
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Want to really understand this technique?
I break down this strategy in full at thefxck.com:
- Premium case study:
- Premium Library: Access our library of 25+ Premium SEO strategy guides for scaling your traffic FAST for £17.
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Sponsors:
- Workello: workello.com/howthefck to get 10% off
- uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
In the final episode with Adam Smith, we look at the keyword research system behind his "beast" SEO case study.
Here's the background on the niche site:
- He bought an aged domain (DR 27)
- He wrote 4 million words (2,300 blog posts)
- It's currently at ~40,000 monthly visitors in <6 months
We've already heard:
- How to identify a profitable niche to target.
- How to leverage aged domains to fuel traffic growth.
In this week's episode, we explore how to raid competitor sites for content ideas that you're all but guaranteed to win.
Adam calls the system "tomb-raiding SEO", and it's the exact process he used to build the content strategy for the "beast".
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Want to really understand this technique?
I break down this strategy in full at thefxck.com:
- Premium case study: Tomb Raiding SEO: The Keyword Strategy Behind the "Beast"
- Premium Library: Access our library of 25+ Premium SEO strategy guides for scaling your traffic FAST for £17.
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Sponsors:
- Workello: workello.com/howthefck to get 10% off
- uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
More with Adam Smith!
This time? The hardest part of niche blogging: Actually choosing a sub-niche you don't regret.
This is the best methodology I've seen to find areas of traffic you can win, quickly.
Adam tells us how to take a data-led approach to this.
The savvy ones of you out there will have already noticed—this methodology (for finding untapped, uncompetitive traffic to win) also applies to SaaS and services.
Really, it's one of the most fundamental principles of SEO research. But taken through a lense I'd never considered before.
Expect to learn:
- How the experts (who frequently build and flip websites) choose niches.
- How to use a SERP analysis to identify weak points where YOUR brand new site can still steal traffic.
- Tricks & tips for winning traffic, fast!
Want to really understand this technique?
I break down this strategy in full at thefxck.com:
- Premium case study: How to Choose a Profitable Niche (Win Easy Traffic, Fast)
- Premium Library: Access our library of 25+ Premium SEO strategy guides for scaling your traffic FAST for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
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Sponsors:
- Workello: workello.com/howthefck to get 10% off
- uSerp: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
—
Related reads:
- Most profitable blog niches
This week, I catch up with niche website expert, Adam Smith, to learn how to use aged domains to accelerate traffic building success.
Expert to learn:
What is an aged domain?
What use cases do they have in SEO?
How can you evaluate them properly (9 step process) so you don't buy a red flag domain?
How to implement them without Google knowing (the ENTIRE redirect process)
Read the teardown (with examples): Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
Sponsors:
Use link: workello.com/howthefck to get 10% off
Visit: userp.io for a great backlink-building agency
In this week's SEO case study, we revisit a story we released in December 2022: How Monday.com Scaled its SEO (1,000 articles in 12 months).
In part one, we lifted the hood of the content operation that underpinned Monday's very first major investment into SEO.
We learned how Monday worked with the content production company, Codeless.io, to make up for lost time.
In part two, we hear from two Monday insiders.
Eliana Atia, Brand and SEO Content Team Lead, who joined the team just after the IPO, 6 months after the project started.
Zoe Averbuch, Senior SEO Manager, who led the project while it unfolded.
Eliana and Zoe tell us the logic behind the strategy; the return on investment for Monday; and how they've since iterated their strategy.
Expect to learn:
⚡ Monday's SEO philosophy: Why failing fast, learning, and iterating were all part of the plan.
⚡ Working together with the paid acquisition team: How Monday's 8 years of heavy ad spend helped optimize their SEO strategy.
⚡ Why prioritization is everything in SEO. And why this means it's important to ship new content before it's fully edited.
⚡ Return on investment: Was the experiment worth it? How has Monday's SEO strategy iterated from their learnings?
⚡ Moving forward: What were their biggest learnings and how are they continuously maintaining their enormous content library?
Read the teardown: Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
Gaetano developed the strategy that took Aura's SEO traffic to close to ~1 million monthly visitors in 12 months.
The blog started with zero content and low domain authority. Now, with only 100-200 pieces of content, Aura holds its own in competition against rivals like McAfee, Norton, and Experian.
In this week's SEO case study, we learn how Aura approached content. Everything from their publishing schedule to why they built a YouTube channel.
Key questions:
- What is "introductionless content?"
- Why do brands need to move into video NOW?
- What do most companies get wrong about keyword research?
- How to do backlink building in 2023
- The power of empathy in content
Read the teardown: Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
Downloadable LEMA framework template: https://www.thefxck.com/lema-framework-template
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In SEO, creating quality, experience-driven content has never been more important.
It now takes 5 minutes to write a better-than-average article using AI. Which means we have just entered into an age of content commoditization.
You need to differentiate your strategy. Fast.
Great content that actually wins in the next 5-10 years needs to be the kind of stuff that you bookmark and come back to read. It needs to go the extra mile.
In short, it needs to follow the LEMA framework. Logic. Explicitness. Memorable. Action.
Find out what this means and exactly how to use it in your content in this week's interview with Lily Ugbaja.
She's written for Zapier, WordPress, Databox, Animalz, and Hubspot. And she knows how to make remarkable content.
Mentioned article: The Idea Farm by Animalz https://www.animalz.co/blog/idea-farm/
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Read the teardown: Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
eCommerce SEO expert, Louis Smith, came on the podcast this week to talk through one of his case studies.
He helped this company grow from £80m monthly revenue to ~£100m in 12 months.
When he started working with this fashion brand, they'd grown rapidly through paid acquisition channels. SEO hadn't been a focus at all, so they had a ton of technical issues, content strategy needs, and best practices to implement across the board.
We look at what those SEO implementations were and why they were pivotal to success.
Think: GeoTags; Category page design; Content strategy; Backdoor link building.
Watch extra videos, get concepts explained, and deep dive into this full strategy in the premium case study.
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Read the teardown: Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
Andy Francos was the Group Head of Organic Performance at Cazoo from day one through to IPO.
In this episode, we learn:
- How Cazoo built a customer-centric organic strategy for the long-term
- Why Cazoo's non-branded search traffic grew from 6k to 120k a month within 2 weeks
- The interplay between PR, national TV ad campaigns, high-profile acquisitions, and SEO
This one's a real masterclass in SEO from one the UKs biggest tech success stories of recent years.
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Read the teardown: Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
This week I’ve got a very special guest Gordana Stretenovic from Workello.
Gordana and her team have grown multiple company's search traffic exponentially again and again from 0 to up to a crazy 1.5m visitors per month.
At one point, her agency produced 800 blog posts per month for their clients with in-house 45 writers and editors.
To get an operation like that producing high-quality content you need:
- Hiring processes
- Enablement docs
- Templates to follow
- And a tech stack to support you
In this episode, we learn the exact processes, documentation, and tools you need in place to build a quality content operation that supports both writers and your clients.
Deep dive content operations: Access our full library of 25+ Premium SEO case studies and deep best practice insights for £17 at www.thefxck.com.
Jake Stainer joined Typeform in June 2015 as employee #29.
In his first couple of weeks, they celebrated hitting £1M in annual revenue from 5,000 customers.
By the time he left just 3.5 years later?
Typeform had:
- 10x the employees
- Grown to $13M in ARR
- Grown their SEO channel to $3M in yearly lifetime value revenue
In this week's SEO case study, we hear how a growth marketer scales SEO.
Deep dive Typeform’s case study: Find the strategy explained in greater detail at thefxck.com every week for £8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 20 SEO case study teardowns and more member-only content.
Hotjar's search volume increased 47% over the past 2 years. That's millions of new visitors each year. And the best thing?Revenue results. It's driving actual revenue results.Hotjar's SEO strategy is mission-critical to their customer acquisition strategy. And as a channel, the costs are proving to be significantly lower.On the podcast this week, I've got Hotjar's SEO content mastermind, Sean Potter, to discuss how one of the most authoritative websites in the world approaches SEO-led growth.Deep dive Hotjar’s case study: Find the strategy explained in greater detail at thefxck.com every week for £8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 20 SEO case study teardowns and more member-only content.
My guest this week built the most successful Retro Gaming website around today.
In this episode, we hear how Brandon's multimedia approach to content creation helped him build a brand with ~100k social followers, 270k YouTube subscribers, and 1 million monthly clicks.
It's extraordinary to think that Brandon's background is in video production. He's not an SEO by trade, he only just realized that he's been naturally building content clusters all along.
Instead of overfocusing on the algorithms, he's built a brand his readers love.
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for £8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 20 SEO case study teardowns and more member-only content.
This week, I catch up with a world-class content strategist, Jakub Rudnik.
Safe to say he's been around the block. He was at G2 as a senior content strategist during the hyper-growth years (seeing all the errors they made with content) and prior to that, he worked at places like the Chicago Tribune as a writer.
Now, leading content at Scribe, I catch up with Jakub to hear how his team built content into a leading growth driver.
Since his arrival, they grew from zero to a lot more than 30,000 monthly visitors. But, more importantly, they grew from 5,000 users to 200,000.
In this case study, we hear how his team produced content at high velocity and then analyzed which topics and types were driving the best outcomes. They doubled down on what was working, iterating the content strategy around revenue growth.
Expect to learn:
- How to build a world-class content strategy
- How to breathe a journalistic quality into your content
- How Scribe measured ROI and iterated it into their strategy
- How your product can lend itself to SEO, and whether SEO is right for your product
It took UserPilot three years to get its first 25,000 monthly organic visitors. And, just 10 months to get to 100,000.
Whaaaat?! Triple the growth rate. 🤯 How on earth did they...
Well, in short, they:
- Learned how to build efficient content operations (scaling from 4 monthly blogs to 40)
- Leveraged programmatic SEO to scale production even further
All without a drop in quality. Interesting. 🤔
This week, I talk to UserPilot’s Head of Marketing, Emilia Korczyńska to hear her story. It wasn't an easy journey. They made mistakes along the way. But from the flames of challenge, efficient operations were born.
UserPilot is now capable of producing 29 long-form blog posts per hour.
Per. F*ucking. Hour.
In this week's write-up, I deep dive exactly how they use programmatic SEO to do this without losing quality, and explain how you can do the same.
Don't like taking notes? Find this case study written up at thefxck.com every week for £8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 19 organic strategy guides and exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
Samantha North learned SEO from scratch and built her niche blog to 3,000 daily visits (75K monthly), all in under 2 years.
In this episode, we deep dive Samantha's story, including everything from the number of blog posts created to how to monetize organic traffic.
The highlights:
- How to choose your niche
- How to monetize a website
- Mistakes to avoid when pursuing your own niche blog
- Three things pivotal to her success
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 19 organic strategy guides and exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
Leading up to their IPO in 2021, Monday.com went all-guns-blazing on content.
They built a huge moat of long-form content which sees them ranking for all their core product use cases and the surrounding pain points.
Now, Monday.com drives over 1.2M visitors to its site every month.
We were fortunate enough to have the engineer behind this strategy, Brad Smith, whose team created 1,000 articles for Monday in 12 months, on the podcast this week to talk strategy.
Brad and his team have mastered content operations and have scaled content for the likes of Robinhood, ActiveCampaign, and FreshWorks, too.
In the first 3 months, Brad’s work led to a 1,570% increase in Monday’s search traffic and significantly more over the next 12 months (now at 1.2M).
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 19 organic strategy guides and exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
This week’s How the F*ck episode centers on a role-play between me and leading SaaS SEO strategist, Brendan Hufford.
Here’s the background. I’m a SaaS founder for a productivity software. Our go-to-market model is sales-led, which means our job is to generate quality leads and hand them off to sales who own the sales process.
The challenge I handed Brendan was that I have 2 people on my team, a head of marketing and a content writer, and we are starting from scratch, with zero content.
Brendan, where do we start?
We covered:
⚡ The alternative to 6-12 SEO retainers and why it’s so effective.
⚡ A four-part framework for SEO success. Brendan uses this to scale his clients from $10m to $100m in revenue.
⚡ How SEOs can use the I AM framework to create content that wins in search.
⚡ Why your product offer is so important, and it’s much more than your software.
⚡ Why copywriter Eugene Schwartz is an important part of great SEO.
⚡ How to create a content plan (our role play and how to ask the RIGHT questions before getting started).
⚡ 5-step revenue-focused content framework for early-stage startups
⚡ Gated vs Ungated content, Brendan weighs in.
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 16 organic strategy guides and exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
Tim's a SaaS SEO specialist, known for his sprints approach and the super insightful strategies he shares on LinkedIn.
In the episode, Tim shared the details behind an extremely impressive growth story.
For one of his former clients, a premium child daycare, Tim helped them grow from barely ranking to earning £13.5 million in revenue via SEO.
That's what we call high-value search marketing. 🚀
We covered:
⚡ The story behind the growth of child daycare to £13m.
⚡ One quick website optimization that ranked the site top 10 (for tons of keywords) in just three weeks.
⚡ Why letting your SEO writers breathe and write content they enjoy writing benefits rankings.
⚡ Why you should just hit publish on content, even when it's 80% complete.
⚡ Why "money" keywords are important and how you can rank #1 for them.
⚡ Three ways to get in front of your target persona, even when there's zero search volume for products like yours.
⚡ The benefits of topic authority for winning trust and enabling your buyer.
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 16 organic strategy guides and exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
Supermetrics just hit $50m ARR. That's more than 5x since Edward Ford joined the team three years ago.
You know what's cool? Supermetrics earned their first $5m in revenue without a single salesperson.
With clever demand generation playbooks and a healthy focus on what actually works, they lead growth from the front. Now they have over 120 salespeople and 30 marketers and continue to grow quickly.
In this episode, we deep dive into their remarkable growth journey.
You'll hear: what channels make up their organic growth engine, the role of organic acquisition and how they captured intent, and product-led content, what is it and why does it work?
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 16 organic strategy guides and exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
This week on the How the F*ck podcast, I have the pleasure of welcoming Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz onto the podcast.
Ryan and Animalz have helped shift the way marketers approach content again and again with their thought leadership.
From articles on the latest SEO trends through to frameworks, models, and predictions for better content, their thought leadership just hits the nail on the head every time.
In this episode, we take a look under the hood of Animalz own content strategy before going through four frameworks that SEOS can use to inject thought leadership into every new article you write.
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 15 organic strategy guides and you'll get exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
This week I’m joined by Ryan Darani, an expert SEO consultant in the Your Money Your Life (YMYL) space.
Ryan grew the website of an eCommerce at-home blog testing kit company from 30,000 to 195,000 monthly clicks in 16 months (a total of 2m clicks and counting).
The content is healthcare focused, which makes it particularly difficult to rank. YMYL content is the type that features on healthcare, financial and government blogs. It’s difficult to rank by design, because if it contains inaccurate, untruthful or deceptive information it could directly influence the reader’s happiness, health, safety or financial stability. In short, Google doesn’t want anybody to win it.
We’ll hear the strategy from start to finish. Including how to understand search intent, how to win difficult keywords, how to infuse quality into your content, where to get expert-level insight from, and how to signal E-A-T.
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to 12 organic strategy guides and you'll get exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
In this episode, Maeva shares with me how she and her fast-growing team quadrupled the revenue of property automation software company, Operto in just 12 months.
You'll learn the fundamentals of Maeva's Foundation-Growth-Scale SEO framework which you can take away, copy and apply at your startup.
Don't like taking notes? Find the strategy written up at thefxck.com every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to these 10 organic strategy guides and you'll get exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
Reflecting on a 10-year career, Kevin Indig shares five important lessons he's learned in his SEO career about management, influence, and execution. The career lessons come alongside fascinating stories from his time as an SEO Director at companies like Atlassian, Shopify, G2, and DailyMotion.
Don't like taking notes? Read the story written up here and every week for $8 per month. You'll also get instant access to these 9 organic strategy guides and you'll get exclusive access to submit questions for upcoming guests to answer.
This week's episode deep dives the organic growth journey of product-led SaaS tool, Respona.
George and his team wrote close to 100 blog posts, driving 20,000 organic keywords—1,500 of which were in position 1-3.
We'll look at how to choose keywords that drive revenue growth, but also build enough authority in the eyes of Google to win them. We'll look at query types and which to go for.
And, we'll end with George's secret sauce: are links required? What's the future of SEO? What's a good client?
Interested in bonus materials? Join our premium community (click here) for just $8 per month to get bonus strategy materials & organic growth playbooks (view the library here) which are jam-packed with extra tips and explanations to help you execute these strategies yourself.
In this week's How the Fck episode, I caught up with the* expert in PR-based link building: Fery Kaszoni, the founder of the fast-growing link building agency, Search Intelligence.
Together, we'll walk you through three PR campaign strategies that Fery has used to, at one point, drive +100 backlinks from famous newspapers in one weekend.
Expect a whirlwind ride through these key points:
- How the PR link building approach works
- A 'reactive PR' campaign that got 100 links in one weekend
- An 'expert-commentary' PR campaign that got 50 links
- A 'data-driven' PR campaign that got 50 links
- And how YOU can do the above yourself easily
If you've written lots of great SEO content and aren't quite seeing the results you expected...this is the episode for you.
Bonus Materials? Join our premium community (click here) for just $8 per month to get this episode’s written strategy playbook (find it here) which is also jam-packed with extra tips and explanations to help you execute the strategy yourself.
No time to listen? Join our premium community (click here) for just $8 per month to get this episode’s written strategy playbook (find it here) which is also jam-packed with extra tips and explanations to help you execute the strategy yourself.
How the F*ck SEO edition kicks off with an interview with the awe-striking Dimitris Drakatos. After stints at leading tech companies like Workable and Revolut, Dimitris joined Peanut to build their organic growth engine.
And, what a wild ride it’s been. In 12 short months, the Peanut blog has exploded from 400 monthly visitors to 2.3M. This kind of growth is extraordinary even in the world of exponential SEO graphs.
So, what types of content was written? How much? Who was involved? What were the secrets behind the success? In this episode we answer these and many more.
Subscribe to the newsletter over at www.thefxck.com.
This week's guest is Jen Montague, Director of Marketing at Dixa (the Europe-based customer service platform that just raised their $105m series C round).
We dig into Dixa's lead gen process, from content creation; distribution process; paid advertising best practice; audience segmentation; and most importantly, the process of taking an inbound lead and turning it into something that your sales team can't WAIT to receive.
Enjoy the episode. Drop us a note on LinkedIn with your feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
“I don’t believe in creating lots of top of funnel content. When you are part of a startup or a mid-market company, everything that you do needs to map to a result.”
In this episode, we catch up with Yaag Ganesh, Director of Marketing at Avoma, to hear about some of the content that he and his team have been creating to drive the startup's growth.
We deep dive into a couple of blog post examples to understand the philosophy and process behind them—and find out a ton of best practices for writing content that actually resonates with a reader.
This week's How the Fxck interview is with the incredible Anthony Kennada, CMO at Hopin.
Anthony was the first marketer and founding CMO at Gainsight, which grew to $100m ARR and sold for over $1bn to Vista in 2020.
At the time of recording this episode, Anthony had just joined Hopin, the explosively fast-growth hybrid events management platform.
(Hopin is the fastest growing SaaS business ever with a valuation of $5.6bn in under 2 years.)
So, safe to say, he knows his stuff and had a ton of tactics to share.
The episode focuses on the demand gen and content tactics that Anthony has used along the way.
In particular, we focus on events.
The Gainsight team is well known for creating the category of customer success, and a big part of that journey was championing the profession through events.
You’ll hear the story of how Anthony and his team created a conference of 300 like-minded people and grew it to +6,000 yearly attendees.
"I started breaking it apart and saying, 'what do I love about my career? What do I love about marketing?' And at the atomic level, I realized it was connection between people, whether digitally or in person, and events are the channel by which that happens. Some of the most inspired work we had at Gainsight was there."
We discuss why most startups should not create a category and the difficulties and common mistakes of those who do.
Towards the middle-end of the interview, we dive into Anthony’s first three weeks at Hopin.
We chat about:
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Why Hopin is not just a natural fit for Anthony, but a brand mission that aligns with his own.
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What growth strategies are underway already.
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What will be prioritised at Hopin? And how will marketing contribute to Hopin’s continued fast growth?
Visit www.thefxck.com for the breakdown, video and timstamps.
Subscribe to the newsletter at www.thefxck.com.
In this week's podcast, we talked to the founder of Planable, Xenia Muntean.
Planable is a social media collaboration and management used by marketers to plan, collaborate, approve and schedule their social media posts.
Planable boasts clients like Social Chain and the United Nations. So, in this episode, we deep dive into the content strategy used to win those customers.
This one is better seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyZWuEG3sFQ
Visit: www.thefxck.com
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In this episode of the How the Fxck podcast, I chatted to Zvonimir Sabljić, founder of AWW App.
Zvonimir and his team built a powerfully engaging customer experience, which they leveraged to rank #1 in Google for some highly competitive keywords.
In this episode, you'll learn how they grew to 1.5 million monthly users, what marketing techniques they used, how they built a competitive advantage, and eventually sold to their biggest competitor, Miro.
What's in the episode:
00:00: Brief summary and intro to the podcast
01:00: Welcome
1:56: Discussion of SEO success on Google
1:43: How did SEO and Google help with the growth of AWW App
3:32: How customer experience helped with the success of AWW
4:26: Discussion of AWW’s customer experience principles
5:06: How simplicity can be used as a tool for success
5:55: Demonstration of how AWW works
10:23: How customer success and speed of engagement of AWW helped them have a low bounce rate
12:06: How does focusing on the user and prioritising their experience by giving them relative content help with ranking on Google
13:20: How many monthly active users is AWW attracting?
13:44: What are the main things you can rank on one page for?
15:00: How did Miro and AWW join forces?
15:30: At what point in AWW’s journey did they start to convert customers to paid?
17:40: How did AWW attract paid users?
Get a mini-Q&A and timestamps for this episode over at www.thefxck.com.
It was an absolute pleasure to interview one of my favourite marketers: Nemanja Zivkovic.
In the episode, we dig into the Funky Marketing success story.
Funky Marketing started in 2019 and Nemanja & co. closed 33 deals in 2020 alone.
If you want to replicate his success on one of your projects, startups or marketing campaigns, this is a must-watch episode.
Download the written playbook on www.thefxck.com.
This week, I had an extremely insightful and in-depth chat with Tom Bangay, the Director of Content at the Series A stage contract automation startup for lawyers, Juro.
We got to the heart of some of the biggest conversation going on in the marketing world right now: brand vs lead gen; gated vs ungated; inbound vs outbound.
But the main topic of this week's podcast is Tom's extraordinarily successful ebook building strategy.
Using the techniques in the playbook we're about to discuss, Tom and his team consistently get over 1,000 organic downloads on their eBooks.
You'll learn:
• How to get influential people from top brands to contribute to your content (even if you've got no brand yourself)
• How to design content that people want to read
• How to decide what to write about: should it be product related or designed for persona fit?
• How to decide WHO should contribute to your eBook
• The secret sauce for getting so many downloads
• So, you've got 1,000 downloads. We also go through what to do with all those contact details to get REVENUE!
Follow us on LinkedIn for regular content!
Watch on YouTube. Download the Playbook.
Kicking off season two with a bang, we've got Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs.com.
In this episode, we cover:
• Growing the Ahrefs blog to 1.5 million monthly visitors
• Why traffic doesn't matter (and why Ahrefs has never used Google Analytics or retargeting pixels)
• How to design content that drives sign-ups (and why you shouldn't waste your time on anything else)
• How to rank #1 in Google (like Ahrefs does for everything)
• What type of content Ahrefs writes and why it works so well
• How to make 'you' focused content that also adds a lot of value
• What are the limitations to this approach?
• How do Ahrefs promote their content? How do they build backlinks?
• What are the six ways content marketing at Ahrefs contributes to revenue growth?
• Are backlinks really important? If so, why?
Join the How the Fxck community to get instant access to this episode summarised into a PDF playbook. Download here.
"You can be successful with a few simple fundamentals and by getting rid of non-essential stuff. Create a product that's genuinely useful to people. Forget growth hacks, make your product indispensable."
This week's marketing leader is Andy Culligan, the CMO of LeadFeeder.
Andy joined LeadFeeder in 2020 and took on the task of creating fresh pipeline and growing revenue through marketing.
In this podcast, he tells the story of cutting the marketing campaign budget to a third (by reducing paid and agency fees) but still getting the same volume of leads.
We learn how Andy and his team put on multiple webinars over the year that more than 15,000 people attended.
Interweaved with the story of webinar success we learn:
- Andy's secret to success (i.e. scaling Exponia from $4m ARR to $16m ARR)
- Why SDRs under marketing works can be vital to growth
- Why you need to make sure leads actually trickle down to a sale. Matching lead gen to revenue outcomes.
- How to design content around your what's keeping your customers up at night
- How to get 1,000s of webinar attendees even if you don't have a big email list
- How to score your leads to only push the best ones to your sales development team
- Why you must immediately follow up on demo requests
- Advice on whether an 'eBook download' should be called immediately, nurtured or just wait for them to have higher intent
- How to get from SEO to a lead
- Why actionable content is king (or queen)
- Why you shouldn't overcomplicate things (which marketers so often do)
Next week, I'll release a playbook. Subscribe on thefxck.com to get it.
Here's a man who needs no introduction: Eddie Shleyner.
I've been wildly excited to release this episode since I recorded it over a month ago.
I was hanging off of every word the first time and the second time I listened to it back during editing.
Eddie displays his deep knowledge of copywriting in this episode.
Having studied the greats, he seamlessly draws on their experience to deliver an explosive number of tips and tricks for anyone aspiring to copywriting excellence.
Eddie's the ex-copywriting lead at G2, copywriting consultant at HelpScout and Drift, and the +7 year founder of VeryGoodCopy.
VeryGoodCopy is vividly useful and educational copywriting blog, newsletter and premium community. The blog hosts more than 250 lessons and interviews and four valuable micro-courses.
He brings all those years of dedicated practice to the interview in which we cover these points:
(1) Eddie's copywriting journey. How can you learn and master the skill of copywriting like Eddie?
(2) VeryGoodCopy's growth journey. Learn the tips & tricks Eddie used to gain 15k subscribers, making this his full-time career, and growing his LinkedIn audience to 32k+ followers.
(3) Why Eddie's process for writing helps him be such a prolific high-quality content producer.
(4) There are 5 elements to every email. Learn what they are and how you can leverage them to grow your business.
(5) 5 high-value pieces of advice for aspiring copywriters that will either kick off your career or take all of your marketing to the next level.
(6) Eddie tells us the strongest human incentive and you can use in your copywriting to consistently drive action.
(7) Eddie gives me a lesson that boosted the conversion rate on my latest eBook.
(8) Learn why the skill of copywriting isn't necessarily your mastery of English. Which copywriter made $200m in sales despite it being his second language.
(9) Towards the very end, Eddie gives us one actionable tip to help generate creative connections that will boost your copywriting conversions.
If any of this blog post convinced you to listen...that's because I've listened to the podcast TWICE. It's that valuable.
Listen here.
I'm excited to welcome Danny Gavin to the podcast this week.
Danny's the founder of the Optidge, the digital marketing agency based out of Texas.
In this episode, we discuss Danny's expertise areas: SEO & paid social.
We focus on one social media ad campaign in particular.
Optidge ran an advertising campaign for Degs & Sal, the eCommerce jewellery brand available to buy D2C (a channel pivot from selling through major retailers like Nordstrom, Macy's and Bloomingdale's).
Degs & Sal had one requirement: to have 2x ROAS on their Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns.
The Optidge took over the campaigns and these were the results:
- 400x increase in total revenue
- 130% increase in DIRECT ROAS to 2.66x
- 72% decrease in cost per purchase,
- 29% decrease in cost per add to cart
- 24% decrease in CPMs. Finally
- 278% increase in unique orders
- 2020 AMA Crystal Award for Best Plan B Marketing Campaign
In the episode, we look at the method behind the success.
You'll learn:
- How to build audiences that convert
- Why you need to design a funnel
- The importance of testing
- How much you need to spend on testing
- What you should test
- Examples of long and short-form copy used in the campaigns
And all in 30 minutes. What's not to love?
--
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and podcast here. Follow us on LinkedIn for daily marketing tips.
Hello and welcome to the How the Fxck podcast, this week we have an incredible marketing leader, Kris Hughes, who I had the pleasure of grilling about content strategy.
Kris has been a senior content creator and content manager for 10 years. Starting off growing a sports blog that evolved into a 15 million visitors a month network of websites, he’s since been a director of content specialising in driving traffic and generating inbound leads for a number of award-winning companies like projectmanager.com and QuickStart, Inc. He’s recently launched his own business aimed at helping solopreneurs and startup teams smash their first 120 days of content creation.
In this episode, we go into How the Fxck-style detail on the first 30-60-120 days. From driving value from your first post, how to conduct in-depth research to find gaps in your competitors content, through to lead generation, Facebook Ads, guest blogging and distribution.
I got excited by this one, it’s so clear and actionable. I hope you enjoy it. Follow me on LinkedIn to get the playbook.
This week, I interviewed Michael Norris, the CMO of YouTech (a Chicago marketing & design agency).
He also hosts YouTalk, a podcast about business and marketing, which I was interviewed on a couple of weeks back about how I built this podcast. I can't bring myself to listen yet…
This week, we focus on Michael’s work with one of his early clients, Urban Matter, which is a news and entertainment website like Time Out. He helped them grow to a large following and high volumes of monthly traffic (500,000 on one viral post!) through SEO, PPC campaigns, viral marketing and inbound marketing in general.
I dig deeper into how Michael approaches SEO, what tools he uses, how he does keyword research, where he starts with clients and how to drive leads that way. If you’re looking for an SEO refresher, this is your episode.
Substack link: https://howthefxck.substack.com/
Website link: https://www.thefxck.com/
Hope you enjoy this episode!
This week I chatted to Holly Enneking, the VP of Marketing at Lev.
I love Lev. And I want to copy their marketing. So it was awesome to dig into the detail with Holly about their 'All You Need is Lev' brand awareness campaign, which was hugely successful and has helped solidify Lev as a leading SalesForce partner.
We start off the podcast talking about channel marketing, which is Lev’s main channel, before talking through the campaign that involved adding the word Lev to song titles and sending Bluetooth speakers to people who open their email campaign.
So fun.
Hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you do please leave a review and make sure you subscribe. We’ve got a ton of recordings in the backlog that I can’t wait to release.
Read the full insight and more of the interview at www.thefxck.com.
This week, I interviewed Rand Fishkin.
You may know him as the founder of Moz.com, a company with +$50m in annual revenue that's used by marketers worldwide.
He's recently left Moz to found SparkToro so I caught him at the perfect time to ask: what marketing tactics are you using to launch your new startup?
He launched earlier this year to a waiting list of 18,000...and we learn what he did to build that list.
We cover:
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Rand's SparkToro journey
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4 methods used to build his audience
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Rand's advice to marketers just starting out
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What Rand thinks is the untapped opportunity in marketing right now.
Check out the full insight on www.thefxck.com
This week, we interviewed Nadya Khoja, the Chief Growth Officer at Venngage.
Nadya joined Venngage when they were a small team of four with (a relatively small) 20,000 organic visitors month. 5 years later they’re a team of 50 with 1.5m monthly visitors, driving 150,000 product signups every single month.
We deep dive how they achieved this success, looking at:
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Tapping into trending topics to create content that goes viral
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How to get high-quality backlinks that build your site's authority
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Incorporating journalists into your campaign strategy
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Ranking for content that converts vs branded keywords.
Hope you enjoy this episode!
I’m sending out a summarised playbook to everyone who’s subscribed to the email list, so if you want that please join us at www.thefxck.com.
Thinking of starting a podcast for your company? This is the only podcast you'll need to get started.
This week's guest is Lindsay Tjepkema, an experienced marketing leader and founder of Casted.
Lindsay was VP of Content at Emarsys when she first saw the opportunity that podcasting presented in the B2B space.
A podcast can be the fuel behind a powerful, focused content engine. Think about it, just one podcast recording with one of your prospective clients can be turned into:
- A transcript
- Multiple blog posts
- An eBook
- 5 audiograms to post on LinkedIn
- 3 audiograms your sales team can send in their outbound work
- Etc, etc, etc.
It's rocket fuel.
And for those of you still teetering on the edge of starting one yourself, this podcast is a great place to get you started.
We cover everything you need to create a podcast that cuts through the noise, tackling challenges that set you as an authority in the industry.
Shhhh 🤫 Casey just dropped the secret to building an influential brand on LinkedIn. Details inside or shared over at the www.thefxck.com weekly newsletter.
"Gosh, it's like you guys are everywhere."
Want your ideal customer to say this about you?
Then you gotta listen to this week's interview.
Stephanie Cox, VP of Marketing at Lumavate drops her entire ABM playbook.
I was so excited by her method that I got our team at SentiSum to start doing this straight away, resulting in me reaching out to Fred Perry with a video of me playing tennis (badly) while trying to recite a sales pitch.
Ask and I might send it to you.
Head over to thefxck.com to get the summary of what we learned from this podcast.
It is not a risk to be different, it's a risk to fit in.
This week I have a genuinely exciting guest: Louis ‘bonjour bonjour’ Grenier, the host of the marketing podcast Everyone Hates Marketers.
He’s interviewed the likes of Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin, and Neil Patel in more than 160 interviews and is also a Senior Marketing Strategist at HotJar.
In this podcast, we talked about radical differentiation and the four steps you need to take to discover your strengths, double down on it, and stand out against the noise in any market.
As a young startup, building brand mental availability requires you to be radically different. Here's how.
Being different is how you make marketing fun.
This week on the How the Fxck podcast we have a KILLER interview with Todd Clouser.
In the last few years, Todd has built up a Youtube channel with around 550,000 subscribers. And it’s growing at a rate of 15-20k new subscribers per month.
If you wanna know how to do this for your business, then you’re in luck because Todd’s come on the podcast to share his secrets in detail.
We go over a 4-step process for getting a large reach from engaging content.
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Identifying the best host and guests (tips on choosing a host and approaching influencers)
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Content strategy (where you can get tips on how long to plan for and how to identify topics that people in your industry really want to hear about)
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Execution
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Leveraging YouTube's analytics
Bonus: how you can promote your content so you get REACH and business growth.
Learn marketing faster by connecting with me on LinkedIn /in/benjamingoodey
Thanks for listening!
This week's interview is with Jonny Plein, founder of Global Savings Group acquisition, Pouch.
Pouch is a browser extension that automatically applies voucher codes at checkout, reducing basket abandonment for brands and finding the best deals for users.
Pouch works with most of the largest UK brands and has around 150-175k weekly active users (!).
In this interview we discuss:
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Getting in +150 large publications.
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Appearing on Dragon’s Den (that’s the UK's version of Shark Tank).
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Skyrocketing visitor count (40k live visitors) and user conversions (2k to 60k in days) after the show.
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Dealing with churn.
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Reaching product-market fit.
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Creating 'wowing' customer experiences.
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The acquisition of Pouch 18 months ago by GSG.
This is such an exciting interview and the second one we’ve done with Dragon’s Den founders (check out Pasta Evangelists.) They’ve always got an interesting story to tell.
Read the full interview with Jonny at How the Fxck, where we interview marketing leaders every week.
MarketingStrategy #Marketing #Branding #DragonsDen #BBC
This week we interviewed Ian Luck, VP of Marketing at CustomerGauge.
They've done some incredible things in the past few years, including:
• Creating a category: Account Experience.
• Won world-leading clients: IKEA, EventBrite, DHL, Philips, and many more.
• Written an 80 page eBook based on original research that drove 30K leads and $2m in revenue without PPC.
• Taken on goliath competitors.
We talked about all this in enough detail for you to do the same and drive growth at your company.
Covering everything from strategy to distribution to the marketing technology used in Ian's campaigns.
Read the interview with Ian Luck here.
This week on the How the Fxck podcast, we have a true marketing leader: Paula Monteiro.
Paula is Head of Marketing at Wikitude, which has been a leader in the augmented reality (AR) world since 2008.
Working with clients like Jim Bean, Nissan and Herbal Essences, Paula and her teamwork to build value-adding, brand-building experiences using AR.
I was lucky to grill Paula on AR, well, specifically the connection and uses for AR in marketing.
Like most people, I had only a basic understanding of AR from Pokemon Go and Instagram filters.
But, it turns out there's much, much more that you can do to connect with your customers using augmented reality.
We discussed use cases like Nissan letting customers look at the inside of their cars in the showroom, using augmented reality to project the engine and its components to their car-lover customers.
I can see the value that can come from brand storytelling with AR. Perhaps not quite yet, but I soon expect to see a more mainstream addition of AR in the marketing tool kit
Find a summary of the insight here: Paula Monteiro on Augmented reality in marketing.
This week we catch up with serial founder, Ariana.
She's a passionate storyteller and an expert in creating multisensory experiences. a big believer in the founder-activist.
In this episode, we talk about customer experience.
You could not get a more passionate speaker to discuss branding, storytelling, purpose and founder activism.
This is a must-listen if you want to get inspired.
Read it here: Multisensory brand experiences with Ariana Alexander-Sefre.
Today's interview is with Devon O'Rourke, founder of Fluvio, the product marketing consultancy.
We discuss the fundamentals of a successful product marketing team so that you can improve both your product and marketing metrics.
This was a great chat, full of stories from Amazon and Etsy, so make sure you come back for the full podcast when you get a moment.
Until then, here is a summary of the insight.
Read the full story at How the Fxck.
Devon O'Rourke: Establishing a product marketing function with an ex-Amazon, ex-Etsy product marketing leader
This week, I am interviewing Dan Ritzke, the founder of Third Act Marketing, a marketing consultancy that helps businesses clarify their messaging and tell a better story so that their marketing efforts are not wasted.
In this interview, Dan and I dive into his area of expertise: messaging. We cover examples of good and bad messaging, as well as the common mistakes he sees and how you can make sure your message resonates.
Spoiler alert, you need to make sure you understand your customer and put them first.
We summarised everything you can learn in this recording on the How the Fxck website.
This week's interview on the How the Fxck podcast is with Gareth Morgan, Founder of one of the UKs largest marketing agencies: Liberty Marketing.
Gareth regularly speaks to audiences about SEO, PPC, and other marketing strategies, and after his +15 years of experience in SEO he is uniquely qualified to do so.
We conquer the world of SEO today. Covering onsite and offsite SEO, from content optimisation and how to do proper keyword research, through to creating sharable content that generates backlinks, this interview is a rare glimpse at how the marketing professionals approach SEO.
Read a summary of the insight here: Gareth Morgan.
This weeks interview is with MJ Peters, VP of Marketing at FireTrace and host of The Industrial Marketer Podcast.
MJ has worked in manufacturing companies her whole career across product and marketing. She’s largely a self-taught marketing leader, and she’s a pro in marketing strategy and inbound demand generation.
In this interview, we start with MJs career and the differences in marketing in manufacturing rather than software, before covering techniques for marketing strategy and breaking into new customer segments.
You can expect to learn how to gather customer insight, how that insight should influence your business model, building out marketing hypotheses, and how to experiment across channels, content type and content topic to determine what resonates with your audiences.
Visit www.thefxck.com to get a summary of the insight in this interview.
Finn Lagun is the Co-founder & CMO at Pasta Evangelist, a high-growth fresh pasta delivery company in the UK.
Back by the biggest names in retail (Harrods, M&S, Ocado), Pasta Evangelist has raised more than £5m from investors.
In this interview we talk about the startups' growth journey, before moving on to Finn's tips on building a brand through content, PR, and events - the examples are SUPER fun.
This week’s interview is with Gaetano DiNardi, the Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva – a tech company that was recently voted in the top 100 companies to work for by Glassdoor.
Gaetano had an unorthodox route into marketing, starting out as a musician and music producer before transitioning into roles as an SEO Manager at Pipedrive, VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker, and Growth Marketing at Outreach.
In this interview we discuss demand gen without the big budget. How you need a marketing flywheel of content, distribution, and promotion all executed through strategic, free channels. We also dive into what metrics to analyse to make sure your leads are high quality, and there’s much more marketing insight dotted around in the conversation.
This week’s interview is with Iona Ratcliffe, CMO at Ocean Bottle, and previously a brand and comms strategist at Wieden and Kennedy, Portas, and Droga5 where she worked on projects with brands like Converse, Nike, Google, and Gucci.
We use Ocean Bottle as a case study to talk about building a brand. We look at the four truths: consumer, category, culture, and company, and how we can weave a thread between them to create a compelling brand story.
We also talked about Ocean Bottles growth, how partnerships on the B2B side have been so valuable, and how they got their bottle in the hands of Ed Sheeran while at Glastonbury Festival.
Chris Walker, CEO at Refine Labs, talks to us about inbound demand generation.
Chris tells us why marketers need to focus on high volume, buyer-led content, and throw away the useless ebook strategy. Doing that will mean more qualified leads from buyers who come to you, and fewer time-wasting leads passed to your sales team.
Read the full interview with Chris Walker at How the Fxck.
April Dunford is a renowned positioning consultant and author of the incredible Obviously Awesome!
We caught up and she told us the story of positioning a product from her early career, as well as insight into her methodology. Find the full transcript over at How the Fxck: April Dunford.