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Welcome to Volume 76
If you’re having a tough day, it’s okay to take a break.
Go for a walk with your dog or alone if you don’t have one.
Drink a glass of water.
Take a deep breath and exhale.
Call a friend.
Watch a funny video.
Just do something that isn’t work related for a few minutes, and see the difference.
I find that sometimes, taking a short break and coming back to your desk gives you a fresh perspective.
Sometimes, the feeling doesn’t go away immediately, and that’s okay too. You can turn up some music while you work. Or do what works for you.
What’s most important is that you’re acknowledging the day isn’t going as planned, but you’re doing so while moving forward. You can always take stock at the end of the day, and find areas where you can make better choices. That’s how we grow.
Before we dive into today’s stories, here’s a peek at what’s to come in this piece:
- Monday.com’s SEO & Brand Strategy
- How We Find High-ROI Niche Advertising Opportunities
- “Link in Bio” App is Now a Unicorn
Monday.com’s SEO & Brand Strategy
Last week, Ross wrote a thread on Twitter that generated tons of reactions. It was a breakdown of Monday.com’s SEO and brand strategy for SaaS marketers.
The thread got me thinking about their strategy, and so I dived deeper to see for myself all the interesting bits Ross called out.
Monday.com has successfully built a reputation as the go-to Work Operating System (Work OS) in less than ten years. Founded in 2014, the brand is currently worth over $7.5B, with 152,000+ customers worldwide, including some of our favorite brands like Canva, HubSpot, and more.
Their website saw over 23M visits from organic and paid sources in February, according to Similarweb. This is what their traffic share looks like:
Even though most of Monday.com’s organic traffic is from direct channels, search plays a major role in its success. The website attracts almost 500K visits every month, one-fourth of which lands on their blog.
Here’s what the website’s search scorecard looks like:
New or existing competitors looking to outshine Monday.com in the SERPs with keywords they already rank for should be willing to invest more than $400K in paid ads. Or acquire the brand (if that’s even an option) as Semrush acquired Backlinko.
One hotspot on Monday.com’s website is their blog. After the home page, this subfolder accounts for nearly 40% of the website’s traffic:
The blog is a library of ridiculously good, high-value, and high-intent keywords. Some of these keywords have a traffic value as high as $30K, while some, though low, have a good number of people searching for them every month.
Here are some of these keywords:
As I said before, one would have to spend over $400k in PPC per month to capture the traffic Monday.com gets FOR FREE via search.
Another thing that makes Monday.com’s blog so attractive and profitable is the way they create content. Ross calls this strategy the 3Es. Monday.com creates content that educates, engages, and entertains its audience.
For example, this project management guide targets and educates project managers and anyone interested in learning about the topic.
This piece of content educates visitors, prospects, and customers on how to become more effective in managing projects. It also positions the product as the go-to solution.
The content is also engaging with great design and storytelling. Using every day, simple-to-understand English instead of complicated industry jargon to make themselves sound more relatable is a good call.
The content also entertains readers with a dash of humor and inspiration. They ensure the reader ends the article feeling empowered to take action.
The Monday.com team also include CTAs throughout the blog post to drive sign-ups:
Let’s do some math:
If the average contract is $2K, assume 0.5% of all visitors convert. This blog post gets as high as 9,500 visits a month. That’s 47 new customers = $94,000/mos in revenue. In a year, they’d have made over $1M.
Monday.com also takes the 3Es approach on social media—educating prospects and users about their product in an engaging and entertaining way. And they use their YouTube channel to execute this flawlessly.
Monday.com’s top-performing YouTube videos all feature content that sells users and prospects on the value of the product for their brand.
The YouTube channel is in the top 10k YouTube accounts for views, with more than 96 million total views on their video library and 50.5K subscribers.
Amazing, right?
While brands like Stripe leverage API documentation to educate users on how to use different product features, Monday.com uses YouTube videos to achieve the same purpose. And let’s not forget some SaaS brands that still rely on blog posts alone to educate their customers on how to use their features.
For SaaS companies, the best product-led SEO approach is helping your target customers understand and solve their problems.
That means creating educational, engaging, and entertaining blog content with great visuals, adding keyword-driven chapters on YouTube videos with eye-catching thumbnails, and much more.
There are lots of other great strategies Monday.com is applying to build a stronger brand and customer base. We’ll be breaking it all down in the weeks to come and sending them right to your inbox. If you’re reading this on the blog, you should sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss out when it drops.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Monday.com has successfully built a reputation as the go-to Work Operating System (Work OS) in less than ten years, now worth over $7.5B.
- One thing that makes Monday.com’s blog so attractive and profitable is the way they create content. Monday.com adopts the 3Es approach to content creation: creating content that educates, engages, and entertains its audience.
- For SaaS companies, the best product-led SEO approach is helping your target customers understand and solve their problems. That means creating educational, engaging, and entertaining blog content with great visuals, adding keyword-driven chapters on YouTube videos with eye-catching thumbnails, etc.
How We Find High-ROI Niche Advertising Opportunities
How do you attract qualified leads with high intent?
Most B2B brands create gated content and supporting threads, decks, and carousels to distribute different channels. Some leverage paid search or paid social media to get the content in front of more people.
While these are great distribution methods we encourage, they sometimes can produce little or no return on investment, mostly because the audience isn’t qualified enough.
Just because someone signed up to download a piece of content doesn’t make them a qualified lead. You need prospects with high intent to purchase, and you increase your chances of finding them when you go after high-ROI niche advertising opportunities.
Niche newsletters and podcasts are two high-ROI niche advertising opportunities most B2B brands neglect.
We recently helped a client generate 50% more qualified leads by sponsoring niche newsletters and podcasts. We found high-ROI advertising opportunities by digging deep to find hidden gems that haven’t gone mainstream but have high affinity.
Here’s what our research process looks like:
We use a reliable tool like SparkToro to reduce the number of hours we spend seeking out sponsorship opportunities, instead of using Advanced Twitter Search and other online communities to find potential sponsors.
For example, we select the “My audience uses these words in their profile” option in SparkToro, enter the keyword “Software Engineers”, and filter by “Only Gems”.
The gems are the ones with the highest potential in terms of engagement and following. These influencers are usually not mainstream, but they have a sizable audience who engage with their content.
The tool runs a thorough analysis to identify podcast hosts and newsletter writers in the niche and provides these results:
We reach out to the most qualified to secure sponsorship opportunities, then sell the client using our findings. We help them see that investing in niche advertising opportunities will generate more ROI than running targeted ads.
In the case of the above, the client saw 50% more qualified leads than they were getting from traditional digital advertising efforts.
There’s so much value in leveraging niche brands’ or influencers’ owned audiences to generate more revenue. You can identify potential advertising and collaboration opportunities in your niche, see what your competitors are creating, see the hashtags your audience follows, and create better content around the topics.
You will gain more ROI, profitable collaboration opportunities, and a healthier lead and customer base.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- We recently helped a client generate 50% more qualified leads by leveraging high-ROI advertising opportunities.
- We used SparkToro to find niche influencers with a solid following and engagement, who are yet to go mainstream.
- We reached out to the most qualified to secure sponsorship opportunities, then sold the client using our research findings.
- You can also use this method to identify potential advertising and collaboration opportunities in your niche, see the content hashtags your audience consumes/follows, and create better content around the topics.
“Link in Bio” App is Now a Unicorn
Linktree hit a little above a billion valuation after its latest funding round.
In just six years, the free “Link in Bio” tool has gained over 24 million users and 40K daily signups. The tool helps creators keep all important links under one link so their audience can easily learn more about their offerings and content.
It’s no surprise that most of Linktree’s traffic share comes from social media, especially since platforms like Instagram and Twitter only let you put up one link:
And most of Linktree’s traffic share comes from Instagram. Instagram doesn’t even let you put a link as part of your regular posts. So, the best way content creators can direct people to every platform they own is to leverage Linktree.
Linktree has also done its best to stay relevant, despite the arrival of competitors on the scene. Last year, they made it easy for consumers to find and purchase their favorite creator’s products with the new Shopify Integration.
Instead of redirecting users to another website to buy their favorite creator’s products, Linktree lets users shop for products directly on the app. They created a revenue stream for creators and made shopping a little easier for their audience.
Linktree also partnered with PayPal to launch its “Commerce Links” feature last year to enable direct payments on the platform worldwide.
Linktree also recently acquired Songlink/Odelski to create a Music Link feature so artists can paste links of their songs on any platform. According to TechCrunch, the artist’s Linktree will auto-populate with links to their song on all platforms so their audience doesn’t have to visit different platforms to get a link.
Seeing Linktree become a unicorn is no surprise, considering what they’ve been up to. These moves show Linktree positioning itself as more than just a warehouse for links. We’ll watch closely to see what Linktree decides to do next.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Linktree hit a little above a billion valuation after its latest funding round.
- In just six years, the free “Link in Bio” tool has evolved to become more than a warehouse for links, with over 24 million users and 40K daily signups.
- Linktree has also done its best to stay relevant, despite the arrival of competitors on the scene, with its Shopify integration, PayPal partnership, and Songlink acquisition.
OTHER NEWS OF THE WEEK:
As a Pinterest creator, you can now export your video content to other platforms.
Apple is scaling up its podcast tools. Starting next month, podcasters can track their audience analytics and access features to improve their subscription rates.
Google Docs now lets you collaborate on an email draft with others and export it to Gmail afterward.
BRAIN FOOD OF THE WEEK:
Having people in your life who have your back is refreshing. It makes you feel like whatever you go through in life, you can always bounce back stronger.
While having people show up for us is great, we sometimes get hyper-focused on their role and impact in our lives, and we forget our role and impact in theirs.
A wise man once told me, “A person who has friends must show themselves friendly.” In other words, it’s important to be supportive, attentive, and dedicated in all of our relationships.
At work, we can show up for our teammates by not only playing our role well but also by reaching out to see how they’re doing. Are they struggling in some way? Is there something you can do or someone you can refer them to that can help them find ease?
We can also show up for teammates by celebrating their little victories as much as the big ones and encouraging them through trying times.
When we do this, we are training ourselves to be people who truly care about the well-being of others, as much as we expect them to care about us.
TWITTER THREAD OF THE WEEK:
Copywriting tips to create blog posts & essays that unlocks ridiculous returns by Ross Simmonds
IN CASE YOU MISSED SOME OF OUR GREATEST HITS:
- How Atlassian Doubled Their Website Traffic with Resource Hubs
- LinkedIn News Headlines: Examples Of Headline Writing Done Well
- What is Content Market Fit & Why Does It Matter?
- What Communication Excellence Means at Foundation
WHAT WE’RE WIRED INTO THIS WEEK 🎧:
These round-ups are brought to you by me, Jessica O., every week ✌!
