Main Takeaways
- Content promotion means creating content that’s easy to build backlinks to or attract passive backlinks with. Content creation and promotion should both be strong, and happen simultaneously. Research and experimentation are necessary.
- Bibi and her team identify “boostable” content assets by analyzing the niche, competition, and current trends. They don’t do a super deep dive in analysis, but follow their guts and insights (and expertise) for the most part.
- Creating fast and cost-effective content that gives people what they want is crucial.
- Double-check results from language models like GPT-3 before using them as they can be inaccurate or not up-to-date.
- To write creative and unique email copy, they start by creating four bespoke emails for different sites in the same niche, making them unique for each recipient. They use pain points to make a connection with a specific group of people and avoid salesy and “linkbuilding-type” language.
- Everyone on the team has a different process for writing email copy, but it works best when they stay close to themselves and their unique personality.
Resources
Website & Social Media Links
Video
Transcript
Alan: Hello. Hello everyone. Hi Bibi, and welcome to the show. It’s so nice to finally have you. How are you today?
Bibi: I’m good. I went to the gym. I’m dying.
Alan: Well, it’s okay. I’ve been, going for a 10 K run, so we’re all extremely dead tired, for this morning podcast. But yeah, let’s do it.
Bibi: Nice.
Alan: Bibi, you and I have been knowing each other for ages now. so I pretty much know all about what you do, but I’ll be curious to dive more, with you into the world of content promotion more in general.
So the first question that I’d like to ask to the guest is, what does content promotion, mean to you?
Bibi: so in the line of my business, it means that you, try to reverse engineer. And come up with content that’s going to be really easy to build back links to or attract passive back links. So the content promotion side could take a lot of forms. It could be outreach, but it can also, be advertising pieces of content or, getting it mentioned somewhere.
Alan: so the clients that come to you, so I’m assuming they come to you for back links, but do they also tell you, we have these like pages that we want to promote and we want them to rank higher? So how does it work?
Bibi: Yeah, it’s actually both of those. of course clients are very different. Sometimes we have an in-house SEO that has a big team or whatever. Other times it’s the owner of the business. so there are levels of expertise and knowledge. They differ as well. sometimes they really know what the target pages are and, but we’ll always dive into the sites as well to see if there’s anything that we call burstable.
that’s, that could, go higher up or anything that can help the target pages. so it’s always a dance, back and forth. But I like to be able to pick, of a couple of different types of pages. So commercial pages and informational pages.
Alan: And so how do you define these,burstable content assets?
Bibi: it depends a little bit on the niche and what’s going on in there, If it’s, something that’s current or trending or something that’s really in demand or something that’s,for a target keyword is ranking somewhere below position three and we can see that the competition is weak, we would say, Hey, that’s boost for you.
So it depends on all different, things really.
Alan: so it’s basically a quick kind of SEO analysis, link building analysis,
Bibi: Yeah, we don’t do a super deep dive. It’s, cuz I’ve noticed that what works really well for me, I’m not somebody who’s going to analyze for days and days. I follow my guts a lot. It sounds really stupid, but, So part of what I identify as burstable is based on analysis, but it doesn’t go super, super duper deep.
And another part of it is really what my own insights are and what my gut tells me. And I’ve noticed that, just throwing a lot of shit against the wall and see what sticks works for us really well. Cuz sometimes a really a piece that’s really boring, starts getting all the links in the world and something that I thought was gonna work really well, it just.
dies and, nobody, nobody cares about it.
Alan: That’s interesting. cause I guess maybe sometimes the content that you think it’s boring is the content that’s less competitive. There’s less of it around, so people might be more interested in seeing this type of content. Is this, the reason that you think,
Bibi: not necessarily because there were also things, I just came up with something around coins. And I thought it wasn’t gonna do well because, I was like, there’s, the competition is really hard, And it’s not that interesting. but it started ranking almost immediately and that, that piece is getting 40 K traffic,
and I didn’t expect that. I thought it was just like, who cares about this shit? But, and how, I know that there’s, that is very niche and highly competitive, But I still,
yeah,
Alan: So yeah, we’re gonna dive, more into how you come up maybe with these ideas. but, I’m also interested to know your opinion on content creation versus content promotion. What do you think should be the balance for a company to follow, essentially,
Bibi: I think they should both be strong, I don’t think one should suffer because of the other.
content should be able to have its own merits. I wouldn’t like promote putting a lot of money or effort into promoting a shit piece of content cuz it’s probably only gonna be temporary results.
So I think it’s why do they have to buy each other? Why would
there, why would you have to put less budget in the quality of your content? And in a counter promotion, it should both be good.
and content creation doesn’t mean that you have to make an epic piece of content all the time. If you give people what they want fast, that’s the whole point, and it doesn’t have to be costly. It can be quite cost effective. A day, you do have to do your anal. you do have to do your research and and be able to, and be open to experimenting.
I also think that, it’s not oh, we’re creating content and now we’re promoting it. I think it should all happen at the same time. Basically, if you wanna do a piece of content around a topic, then you should already be talking to people or or doing some, yeah, feeling around or maybe promoting it a little bit or start with a little piece of it.
Alan: That’s very smart. Specifically when you do like research, like data driven content, it’s very useful to reach out to people before you publish the content to let them know, hey, I’m working on this piece of content. Would you be interested in me saying, sending it over once it out is this something that you do for the clients as well
Bibi: no, not really. I think if I would be part of the marketing team or PR team, that’s probably what I would. What I would do if I only had three clients, that’s probably what I would do. But we have a lot, so I probably do less than I want to, but I also have to watch the scope of the project, that I don’t get.
I get involved, but I don’t get too involved.
Alan: So for me, I remember when I, when it was only myself and one client, in the very beginning, I started off and I was doing, for every single target page, I was doing the pre outreach. So reaching out to 50 people to let them know about the content and then reaching them out again after that.
And then, yeah, as soon as we got to two or three clients, I was like, oh my God, I can’t do this anymore. yeah, let’s back track a little bit. And so how you got started in link building and specifically why did you decided to focus? mainly on doing guest posting instead of something as like broken link building like a lot of people do or link placements like we do.
Bibi: Yeah, I think it’s what it was actually the first, things that I did because I did a internship before I got into link building. It’s, Noha Digital and, we would partner with them onsite and affiliate sites and then do outreach for them. And I don’t think we did anything else than guest posting.
So that was what I was used to. So I stuck, to it basically. but another part of what I do is, creating or helping create linkable assets that attract passive back links. So I think now it’s maybe 70% guest posts and 30%, coming up with ideas that we’ll get, back links.
Alan: Yeah, It’s always coming down to where you get your start in. Like for myself, I started doing link placements because I was working for this one affiliate site that had a ton of content already, so we didn’t want to spend extra budget in doing guest post articles. So I. like creating extra content.
So we just decided to take the content we had and find ways to get the placements in existing articles and then that stuck with me and this is what we do to this day.
Bibi: yeah. That said though, so I have a couple of link builder friends and they all have their special specialty, And we’re always jealous of each other. Alwaysoh, I wish, when you talk about link placements, that’s not my biggest strengths, but I always wanted to become better at it.
Alan: Yeah, I guess that’s also the shiny object syndrome, So you always want something that you don’t have, and you’re always looking for something new. Cause otherwise there’s like the novelty factor, of the thing.
Bibi: Yeah. but.
I do think that, for companies that start in link building, You should definitely start with the content first. So make sure that you have good content, and then for every tactic that you use, make sure that you have the type of content that works with that tactic, because that’s gonna be a long-term investment and when you grow stronger at some point.
You’ll have to do less of the content promotion, Because you have such strong content. I’m not saying make great content and links will come. That’s definitely not the case. But you should never just hop from one tactic, to the other because it’s not working, and at the same time, don’t not improving your content.
Alan: so how do you define specifically the quality of a good link placement?
Bibi: So I always like to think in terms of audiences. of course, keyword is important too. You know that your keyword is somewhere in the article or if possible in the title, which not, which is not always possible if you’re doing, unpaid backlinks and stuff. But, at minimal it should have an overlap with your audience.
So if e, even if it’s about a related interest or a related problem or whatever, it’s totally fine as long as you feel that the people that are in there could be your potential customer. And then of course it has to look, to me it has to look natural and relevant. It can’t just be forced in there.
Alan: And so how do you do this kind of audience research? Do you have any tools or you just like Google or look at the websites?
Bibi: Yeah. we look at, client websites and we have, before a lead goes through, I have a long list of questions. It’s 24 questions. And a lot of those questions are all about the audience. So they’re all about what is your target for q1? what segment are you focusing on? What is your ideal customer?
All those kind of things. And then,I learn a lot about their audience. I also learn, I have a lot of assumptions and then I learn it. They’re not true, So sometimes, I have a client in specific supplements and I thought, oh, these are all men, all these biohackers. and then the guy said,no, they’re all women’s 35 plus.
And I was like, oh, okay.so that opens up a whole different list of prospects that you could, reach out to.
So that’s how I find out about the audience. But I also look at their competitors who are targeting and look at their ads, cuz it tells a lot too about the demographics. and I just look around in the niche, in the trends and things like that.
And, I also started to compliment that with talking to, Giro. So G P t Chat, chat gt, I always call ’em Giro. And and they also come up with some angles that I didn’t realize. And it’s not just in terms of oh, which audience do you think is interested in this product or in this surface, but also, what kind of.
Other interests do they have? What other pain points do they have? And that tells you a lot more. Cuz if you have a customer pain points and then which companies are all involved in that pain point, those are all prospect lists because they’re not your competitor, but they’re catered to the exact same problem.
Alan: that’s very cool. We do something similar when we do our prospecting. so to come up with the keywords that we need to scrape existing pages. What we do is we ask to charge G p t something like, what are some, some like related topics to this topic here, that are not like directly talking about this topic.
Or sometimes we might be like, what is an umbrella topic? Of this like niche topic to find more generic,pages and articles
Bibi: yeah.
that’s how we use it too. and sometimes I also feel like,I will ask about pain points and you will ask about related topics, but I also found out you can sometimes be pretty direct where I can ask what are related companies that are not competing with this site? Don’t just start listing all the companies, so sometimes I also underestimate,
Alan: yeah. I did try something like that, but then I noticed that I had to double and triple check every time because some of those companies maybe were not, active anymore. some of them were , direct competitors or things like that. especially
because the data, yeah, the data is not super fresh,
Bibi: You definitely have to check it, but it does give you seed ideas. I always say that Jao is very, intelligent, but they’re, not wise. So that’s something that take into account. and they make a shit up like, Gito can’t count words. So if you ask it for a 40 word paragraph, it will give you 72.
And then if you say, oh, is this 72 or 40? And then it will just lie. And then you say, make a table and start counting every word like that. And then it will come up with, 72, and then you a And then I, in this instance, I asked Chipper, like, why did you say, why didn’t you make the mistake then if you counted it?
And then I said, yeah, I’m a lang. No, he said, I’m a language model. I make mistakes just like you. And I was like, Okay.
You’re,
can’t
trust you.
Alan: Oh, that’s funny. but yeah, definitely double check, chat GT results.
Bibi: Yeah.
Alan: So you are very well known for the creativity they use in writing email copy.
And so I’d be curious to know what’s your process, for writing, like creative and unique, email copy that kind of stands out
Bibi: yes. Yeah. I don’t make the templates anymore. My, my team does, and actually every. Every person has a different process. but I noticed that the, what works best for them is to stay if they stay close to themselves, So we have one person, Sammy, he’s completely, he’s very cookie and he’ll just start off on something that’s so out of this world, so quirky and weird.
And that’s really great, but sometimes we know we have to tone it down. So that’s how he does. He just does some free flowing madness. And then we have another guy, bill, and he’s a musician and he takes a lot of inspiration from lyrics, so he incorporates that. But, for me, myself, templates are usually, If, wait, let me just give a tip,
If you want to make more creative templates, you should just start making, four bespoke emails in the same niche for different sites and make them very unique. So the person who’s reading it, it can only be meant for them. It cannot be meant for anyone else. And every word counts. Every element counts.
Avoid salesy stuff, linkability stuff. And then the funny thing is, after you’ve done four emails, a pattern starts to show up. Then you can build your templates and send it out to all the prospects in there. But what I usually do is that I have a, like a dump file. and I just start poking around in a niche and I just steal little bits of all the articles that I see, all the quotes that people did, jokes I like a lot, and I just, without any judgment, I put it in dumb file and usually it’s one or two pages, long and then I start crafting my, like clay,
Then I start, building my template from that. But, The problem is when you’re writing a template, you shouldn’t be thinking like, oh, I’m writing a template. Oh, I have to use this element like, like a subject line or this like that. You have to, without any judgment, just dump everything in there and then just start doing it.
And pain points really work well. So if you say you’re reaching out to graphic designers, they all have similar pain points like dealing with clients or fonts they hate or whatever. And you could use that all in your intro, and that’s how you make a connection with a specific, group of people.
Now with Jabo, what I noticed is that everybody uses it differently as well in my team, but everybody uses it. So one person will take an existing template and they’ll go to Gipetto and they say, Hey, can you write something like this? But then for perfume, manufacturers, and then Jao does it, I haven’t been able to do this, but for some reason does it?
and another person just, asks Gipetto for, to tell a story about a bad day or something, and then they make the Tempe based on the story. What I do is that, I’ll take, I’ll work through element by element. So an outreach email typically has a subject line, a greeting, an intro, a segue, a pitch, an ask.
a sign off and a footer, And I just start, it doesn’t matter where I start, I just start taking element by element and having Chapo work through it. And I say, change this word, make it weirder, make it funnier, or whatever. And that’s how I come up, with the
So it’s different for everyone.
Alan: So when you reach out on behalf of your clients, do you use, like a fake persona? Do you reach out on behalf of someone in the client’s company or as yourself?
Bibi: It’s a mix. So we always ask clients what they’re comfortable with. We like to do, a combination of things. So we like, a fake persona and a non-branded fake persona to show they’re affiliate writer. Then we also like a branded fake persona if the company’s pretty big or something. And then, if the client really wants it, we’ll use somebody within their company.
and that can work really well, but it’s also can cause some problems because, if they want to talk to that person or whatever, we have to ask. Ask them. but we usually do a combo of things. I do have to say that, overall the freelance non-branded persona works best for us
Alan: so this would basically be like you say, we are freelance writer and we work for this company.
Bibi: No,
we don’t say anything. Nobody cares about that.
They only
care about the quality of the content
Alan: definitely agree with that. But I also have to say that we. Have been doing outreach on behalf of this client. The company’s quite well known. the guy that we are reaching out on behalf have is also quite well known in the industry. And so everybody is like super positive when they reply.
They’re like, oh, hey there, nice to see you. I’ve been following you on Twitter or whatever. Yeah, take the link for free. that’s been working really well.
Bibi: Yeah, it converts that’s not the problem. But if we feel uncomfortable doing it, So it’s more like our feeling and with it, like if somebody says, oh, I met you at this because we’ve had this, Where people say, oh, I met you at the conference, or I’ve seen you there, or how is that going?
And then we’re like, oh fuck, now we have to relate to the clients cuz we’re not gonna reply
without checking with the client. yeah. And that’s
the part that I don’t like. but using the brand of the client definitely works. So
Yeah. If, if, if you’re good process for that, then I definitely do, would do that.
Alan: Something that I’ve been recommending to clients is whoever you are inside the company, try to build some kind of personal brand, because it always helps in whatever you’re doing.
So how do you think link building fits, within, promoting content?
Bibi: if you have a website, you should be, do, you should be building links. If you don’t have a website, don’t build links, but, or if you’re, if you have some kind of online presence, If you’re in an app store or whatever,
you should probably build links as well,
Alan: you should always say be proactive about building links, or should people just focus on creating the best possible content and then hope that will acquire links naturally.
Bibi: No, because content always serves, has a goal, some content is meant to convert. Some content is meant to whatever brand or whatever. But, so if you wanna build links, you should also try to come up with some content that you, that is good for link building.
Alan: Something that I always tell to client is when they ask them, why do we need to doling building? The most common answer is because your competitors are doing it. So you wanna stay ahead of them, you probably wanna do it as well.
Bibi: Yeah,I don’t know if I agree with it, but I do think it, that’s probably a very sensitive point, and it probably works with all clients. Whenever you want them to do something, you should say your competitor is doing it, and then they’re
Alan: Yeah. True. Yeah, true.
Bibi: yeah.
Alan: so how do you measure the success of one of your campaigns? Is it the number of links, the quality of the links, the traffic from those pages? What is it?
Bibi: usually traffic and ranking. And then also beyond that, if it’s the traffic. So it depends, of course, a little bit on the goal of the ca of the efforts, of link building efforts. some people just wanna have a new site and they want their site to start, showing up. Others they want to have, more conversions on a specific page.
So yeah. But
it’s, it is overall, it’s, traffic and ranking.
Alan: so do you basically get,these goals from the clients? Like you ask them, what’s your goal for this page? What’s your goal for this other page? And do they share, their Google Analytics tracking and things like that with you to be able to measure that?
Bibi: Yeah. So we don’t measure that. They measure it, but I do often have access to Google Analytics, but, all my clients, they have in-house SEO teams. So they’re tracking all that.
Alan: And so in terms of success, can you give me an example of maybe a recent, campaign that was successful and what do you think made that campaign successful?
Bibi: thing I really liked was, an Amazon based business. And, they’re actually a manufacturer and they sell directly on Amazon. and they have a lot of,revenue from that. But then they launched their own site and it was, scary for them.
And then I checked the, I just check in H Rev. I do have access to their Google Analytics experiment. Often. I’m so lazy. I just go to H Rev and then I saw an H Rev, I saw the graph going like this, and it went whoop. And then I was like, yeah. So I’m very, simple like that. So that was, that was success.
And what I liked about it was that, um, we came up with a, audience segment that they didn’t. Hadn’t had not come up with.
And and it was around a trending topic. It was around a specific lifestyle, and now they’re gonna develop a whole line of products around
that.
So that, that made me, and that was not my idea, that was actually idea of my sister Adelia.
She
works
And it wasn’t something that I thought would work, but it was something she personally was interested in as well. And then, it somehow clicked. So that was really cool to
see.
Alan: This is a very good example of how sometimes, the promotion and the extra research that you have to do to promote content can actually help to improve the product and to improve the business
Did you do anything specific or like special to come up with the outreach for this campaign?
Bibi: No, it was just looking at a different angle and that
was all that there was.
Alan: yeah, so then you customize the templates and the email copy for this new segment.
Bibi: Yeah. Yeah, yeah,yeah. it’s always, cause it’s always, we call it theming, so it’s always themed towards the prospect. It doesn’t mean that you have to talk about the stuff that they’re talking about, but just has to connect with them in a way.
Alan: I guess we’re basically to the end of this. so the last question that I always like to ask people, And I really hope you’re prepared on this because it’s very important to me is so if you could have any, it’s, so if you could have any like eighties movie character promoting your content, who would they be and why? eighties or the nineties.
Bibi: The nineties, the dude from Big Lebowski,
Alan: Oh, awesome. And why?
Bibi: he’s my hero man. He’syou. Do you know how many I know you are a fan of Back to the Future? I’m a fan
of Big Lebowski. I’ve seen that
Alan: Awesome.
Bibi: I think 12 times or something.
Alan: I have to rewatch it then. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
definitely well, thanks a lot Bibi, for being on the show. Is there anything else that you like to say to the audience?
Bibi: happy Easter. I.
Alan: Yeah, I thought there was more in line of link building tips or
Bibi: Oh shit. Oh, sorry.
Alan: works.
Bibi: link Building. Link Building.
Alan: Final link, building wisdom.
Bibi: final link, building wisdom. just try a lot of shit, but then stick to the thing that works well for you and start building it out.
Alan: Awesome. All so where can people find you and yeah, reach out to you to get in touch.
Bibi: Yeah, they could go to my really Fucky company website. It’s completely falling down in despair. It’s bb buzz.com andotherwise just Google BB link builder and you’ll find me in lots of different places.
Alan: Awesome. Thanks a lot for being here, Bibi and with Toxin.
Bibi: Yes. Thank you. Bye.