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Article's Content
Welcome to volume 36!
Stripe launches Stripe Identity and strips the identity verification competition of their identity.
The payment processing unicorn is expanding its product offering to encapsulate the entire secure payment processing process.
Before we get into that, here’s a peek at what’s to come:
- Stripe steps into identity verification
- How Salesforce built the best B2B ecosystem
- Links: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the necessary optimizations
Hopin, the leading online event management platform, is expanding into hybrid and in-person events with the acquisition of Boomset.
Adding to Hopin’s range of product offerings, Boomset will provide on-site focused tools and services such as name badge printing, self-service check-in kiosks, and attendee tracking management to list a few.
If you’re interested in the rise of Hopin and its impressive backlink acquisition strategy, make sure to check out: The Hopin Backlink And Brand Flywheel.
Stripe Strips The Competition
Following Stripe’s Series H funding round, in which it raised $200 M, the company’s valuation hit $95 B — making Stripe the most valuable privately held company in Silicon Valley.
That valuation was reached on the back of Stripe’s core product offering: payment processing. And now, they are expanding their reach beyond processing and into identity verification with its new Stripe Identity.
Introducing Stripe Identity: https://t.co/BlvDaEqi5s.
✔️ Seamlessly verify legitimate users
🔧 Use the same tech Stripe uses against fraudsters
🔍 Catch bad actors with insights from StripeHere’s how some businesses use Identity today. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/2ZA1atPO8V
— Stripe (@stripe) June 14, 2021
Before we go on to discuss Stripe Identity, we need to take a moment and recognize how well they have promoted their product.
- Using video content to display the ease of use and the developer code
- A Twitter thread that breaks down specific use cases
- An interactive landing page highlighting each feature
It is something to marvel at!
Stripe has leveraged video content very well for this launch, as Stripe needed to build trust from their audience to get it off the ground; and there is no better way to do so than providing a peek behind the curtain. Next time you go to launch a new product make sure to take note from Stripe!
Now back to it — Stripe wasn’t the only company that noticed the lucrative market for easily integrated ID authentication; in fact, many startups were positioning themselves as the “Stripe for identity verification.”
But no startup can position itself as such any longer, since Stripe Identity has quite literally become the “Stripe for identity verification.”
Stripe Identity is a self-serve tool for companies to use in verifying their users’ identities; it relies on computer vision and machine learning to read and match government IDs with live selfies. Stripe accesses customer data via an encrypted format and claims that this process will take as little as 15 seconds from selfie to security.
Already a behemoth in the payment processing industry; Stripe is expanding its product excellence to become a behemoth in secure identity validation.
With two monopolies under their belt, competition within the payment processing industry will shrink significantly. But hey, Stripe is considered the “startup everyone loves” so I don’t expect many complaints to roll in.
Speaking of Stripe’s perceived persona, they have excelled in creating not only products that users love but an impressive internet infrastructure and company as a whole.
Stripe is a company that knows who its audience is, what its audience needs, and where its audience hangs out online. Putting all of those audience insights together, Stripe is able to uncover valuable insights into pain points and future growth opportunities.
In addition to learning from their audience, Stripe is able to effectively target and market to their desired audience of developers because it knows where they are and what they want.
For more on Stripe’s content marketing excellence, check out: How Stripe Grew $36B in 10 Years Using The Power of Content & Design Excellence.
Key Takeaways
- Stripe is kicking the in-app identity validation competition to the curb.
- Video content displaying product previews has helped to create transparency and trust in Stripe Identity.
- Built on the back of content marketing excellence, Stripe knows where to engage its audience and in turn identify product expansion opportunities.
Salesforce’s B2B Ecosystem
If you’re not familiar with what a business ecosystem is, it isn’t dissimilar to an environmental ecosystem—where many organisms live in peace and harmony to maintain viable living conditions.
For software companies, the organisms are developers and companies that interact with your product and come together to provide value to users and ideal audiences
And Salesforce has excelled in creating a B2B ecosystem!
Starting with their marketplace for apps, app-propriately named the AppExchange; Salesforce hosts apps, plugins, tools and hundreds of templates, built by developers and companies, aka ISV’s (Independent Software Vendor) partners. Salesforce created a space where software providers can benefit by promoting their products and its audience can benefit by finding the best solution to meet their needs.
Salesforce also hosts “Demo Jams” which are a chance for app developers to demonstrate and discuss their new app in 3 minutes or less.
But it doesn’t end there!
Consultants and professional services are getting in on the action. They act as implementation partners to support technical and project execution elements for the brands planning a migration on to or improvements of their existing Salesforce platform.
And it still doesn’t end there!
Above is the promotion plan Salesforce offers those who write guest posts for its site. Because without distribution, your content will easily fall by the wayside.
Still, you first need to create content to be able to distribute it, and Salesforce has leveraged their community to handle creation in a similar way as distribution:
By providing a templated approach to both content creation and distribution, Salesforce is able to put their community to work with a purpose.
Because Salesforce’s partners have a stake in the success of its website and AppExchange, they are motivated and encouraged to create and distribute valuable content to support Salesforce.
And that is the roundabout way Salesforce has created one of the best B2B ecosystems!
Key Takeaways
- Building an ecosystem is the best backbone to a successful community.
- Salesforce built up a loyal community around their top-notch products and mutually beneficial platform.
- Creating a mutually beneficial platform is the best way to get your community involved as a content creation engine.
Let’s Talk Links
We have some John Muller insights into handling unnatural links that are hurting your page rankings.
We do recommend taking the time to review, clean up, and document any issues like those. The webspam team likes to see that you’re aware of the details & have taken action. If for whatever reason you can’t clean it up on the other site, the disavow tool can be useful too.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 5, 2021
If you’re caught with unnatural links on-site, it’s time to clean your black link profile.
What’s an unnatural link you ask? It is a spammy link that doesn’t add value to your site, was paid for, or was attached by a spammer that is dragging your website into the less than desirable parts of the web.
Purchasing backlinks is a poor play in the SEO world because the only thing Google supports paying for is ads… and you will be penalized for buying links.
Yet it can be at no fault of your own that these unfavourable links are appearing — unless you are engaging in black hat SEO.
👆 As you can see, Foundation’s site is no exception to unnatural links appearing in our backlink profile.
It’s just the nature of the online beast but there are ways to remedy these unnatural links that could be dragging down your page ranking and site authority.
Disavowing the link is a good start but you need to complete the clean-up by removing the spammy links completely and documenting the action taken.
It isn’t always easy to have a link removed by a site that is actively attaching itself to your site, but you can always reach out and ask for it to be taken down. If that doesn’t work you can go over its head and reach out to the hosting platform. You can use a tool like WHOIS to find out the hosting provider.
As long as you have tried your best, you can rest easy and know that Google is good (some of the time) at recognizing these unnatural links and paying no mind to them in judging your site.
Key Takeaways
- Take some time to clean up your backlink profile by disavowing unnatural links.
- If you have been plagued by spammy links, disavow, then reach out to have the backlinks removed and document the action taken.
- In the best-case scenario, these links will cause no harm to your site as Google can identify a spammy third-party site and its nasty link tricks.
OTHER NEWS OF THE WEEK:
💻 Neeva, an up-and-coming Google, is pledging to share 20% of sales with its content partners Quora and Medium if they directly answer a querist question.
🛒 With $2M in seed funding, BuyerAssist is launching its “operating system for B2B companies to deliver the most effective buying experience” in beta.
👩💼Tech startup, Anrok, has secured $4.3M in fundraising to support SaaS companies by taking the guesswork out of applying global sales tax to products sold online across the globe.
BRAIN FOOD OF THE WEEK:
Amazon has successfully operated multiple 1,200 – 2,300 square feet Go Grocery stores and upsized to one 10,400 square grocery store last year. But can they keep trending up?
Opening today in Bellevue, Washington, Amazon is opening their fourteenth Go Grocery location, and this time they are going big. This new location is 25,000 square foot which is slightly smaller than the 35,000 square foot Seattle location run on Dash Cart technology.
Amazon is dead set that its Just Walk Out technology powered by overhead security cameras and pressure-sensitive shelves will be able to scale up to any size. And so far it has proven successful.
Seems like the sentiment of robots taking our jobs is coming to fruition.
TWITTER THREAD OF THE WEEK:
Ten Twitter Advanced Features by Dickie Bush
WHAT WE’RE WIRED INTO THIS WEEK 🎧:
Lets Link by WhoHeem
Originally sent out, by me Cali B, on Thursday, June 17, 2021.
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