1,2,3 Product Weekly #2: SaaS SEO Shortcuts,& Influencer gifting

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Here is what to expect in this Saturday’s newsletter.

• Eric Siu’s take on SaaS SEO & Content sprouting

• How Surfer SEO won in a very competitive landscape

• Startup CEOs marketing insights from Hampton 

1. Eric Siu on SaaS SEO Shortcuts & Building a Media Moat

A couple of days ago I was listening to Eric Siu - founder and CEO of Single Grain, a full-service digital marketing agency share his SEO insights on Nathan Latka’s channel.

Eric shared several on winning with SaaS SEO including:

50/50 Content - Let’s say you are publishing ten SEO content pieces every week. Let five be new content and the other five, be updated content. Refreshing content is often underrated but is a competitive edge for those who do it.

Eric mentioned HubSpot has a full-time team focused on refreshing content weekly. Also, sometime back, Neil Patel mentioned they do at least 3 content piece refreshes every week.

Content Sprouting Framework - Simply put, repurposing every content piece you produce is how you build a media moat. Check the visual below and take your content distribution an extra mile.

2. Winning Surfer SEO with Partnerships and Chrome Extension

This week I shared my takeaways from Surfer SEO CEO and Co-founder Lucjan Suski on scaling to $15m ARR with only $1m ad spent.

In Lucjan’s presentation, he shared first shared the failures they learned along the way. Check the screenshot below;

Along the way, I picked two interesting inflection points that saw Surfer SEO take off in revenue.

Building a Chrome extension  

The back story begins when Lucjan and the team saw Keywords Everywhere revolting on Facebook groups about them going premium. Initially, it was a free tool for keyword research.

Considering they already similar database, the team at Surfer SEO built a Chrome extension in a few days and made it free.

The outcomes:

• A tone digital PR

• 500k organic traffic

• Over 65k users

The lesson: Keep a pulse in your space, and whenever an opportunity pops up, ride the way. It may be the growth moment you have been waiting for.

Partnerships with a twist

The back story is that Jasper users were requesting Surfer SEO integration for a while. During a call with the Japsper AI team, they decided to build an integration, and was live within 48 hours.

The partnership works like an affiliate where Surfer SEO pays Jasper for every paying customer that comes from their platform - a whopping 30% for life.

The outcome - the partnership generates 20% of Surfer SEO revenue.

The lesson: Mutual partnership is a strategic move when building and scaling a SaaS startup. Last week I covered a similar case study by Chili Piper.

3. Vfairs’ MVP validation, Plunge’s influencer gifting, Eezy on customer acquisition & retention

Vfairs validating MVP with paid ads,

The quickest way to validate your MVP is with paid ads - that is if you have some funds to spare. However, there are a couple of ways to go about it - for example Vfairs.

• Focus on the competitor’s keywords,

• the most expensive in your category

• long-tail ones focused on the bottom of the funnel

This will help you validate if you're in the right direction or not by understanding what the prospects are looking for.

Plunge’s Influencer gifting

Michael and Ryan shared their story on Hampton of building Plunge - DTC cold plunge bathtub into a $80m revenue in 4 years. Here is how they scaled with influencer marketing.

• First, they started by emailing their existing customer bases and friend networks. That sold us the first 20. 

• Then they bought thecoldplunge. com for $10 on GoDaddy and shot up Google's organic search ranking to the first page in 2 months. Later won on search with the term ‘plunge’ hitting over 10k searches.

• Installed the plunge for Aubrey Marcus whom they commented on his IG post and the rest is history.

After getting Aubrey on board, they requested he gift the plunge to another influencer. From there they scaled the influencer gifting + roadshow concept that eventually led them to the doorsteps of people like Tony Hawk, Andrew Huberman, and more. 

The Lesson for SaaS Founders - When partnering with B2B creators, offer a gift subscription to bring another creator on board. This will create a network effect and spread word of mouth about your products.

Eezy on customer acquisition and retention

Shawn Rubel, - a Kentucky graphic designer shares on Hampton how he built Eezy to 100m users and over $15m ARR taking on giants like iStock and Shutterstock.

The acquisition and retention insights include:

• Acquiring great and free content that is reviewed manually

• Reduce churn through affordable pricing compared to the competition

• A straightforward license agreeable to both customers and users (differentiating factor from the completion)

• A customer-first approach to support

Simple but underrated concepts (pricing, support, great content) by competitors can build a successful business - don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

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Thanks for reading!

God’s speed.

Okerosi