DA (02:40):
Thanks so much for joining me today on the SaaS breakthrough podcast. Excited to have you and Growth Gorilla here. How are you doing today?

AS (02:47):
Hey David. I'm great. Thank you for having me. It's been kind of a sunny day here in the UK, which is weird. And so, yeah, it's all good.

DA (02:57):
That's amazing. A sunny day in the UK. You get like one every what, like 45 days or something like that?

AS (03:02):
Yeah, it's very rare.

DA (03:05):
I'm in Florida. I'm always looking at sunny skies, but it's already like summer here so.

AS (03:12):
I kind of envy you for that.

DA (03:14):
That's a good place to be minus COVID. Alan, I want to learn and talk a lot about content creation today, SEO, but before we do that, why don't you take a moment? Explain to our listeners what Growth Gorilla is, when you founded it, who your customers are and what you're doing uniquely in the market?

AS (03:34):
Sure. So, Growth Gorilla was founded in 2018. Essentially, we are a content promotion and link building agency for SaaS companies. And so our target like client/customer is software companies that are like profitable. So doing at least 1 million in annual revenue. And the main thing is that they should like already be publishing a ton of content, but they don't have the resources or the time to promote the content internally. And so this is where we come in. We basically kind of try to act as like a basically like an outsourced content promotion team for the clients. And so we take the content that they have already published on the website and we try to support it with a manual outreach to build backlinks and to give them traffic essentially. And so, so yeah, we are unique because compared to most other link building agency, we don't focus only on selling the backlinks, but we try to support the clients with an actual strategy and we come up with a roadmap so that they feel confident that they can work with us basically on the longer term. So we don't just try to sell like 10 backlinks per month, but we really want them to feel comfortable and know that we have their backs and we can support like all of their content promotion efforts essentially.

DA (05:02):
You know, it's a big question we ask on here a lot. Like we talk a lot about content creation, content strategy, and I'm always asking about distribution. I think there's so much to it. So you guys provide a much needed service there, after that content strategy has made working within the company. How did you find productmarket fit when you're building out this agency and you know, why did you choose SaaS of all industries or niches to go after? It's kind of a smaller community.

AS (05:29):
So, yeah, definitely. So basically so when I started doing link building and content promotion, I was working for like affiliate websites and all that kind of like usual stuff. But then I started talking with my brother who is a copywriter for SaaS and he was telling me how good it is to work with software company, because like most of them for the most part is young people. They kind of already know what link building and SEO, content promotion and all this stuff is. So I wouldn't have to do the hard sell with software companies basically, and try to explain what link building is and why they need it. For the most part, they are already aware of the problem and that they need it. And so I just decided to start off, I found basically the first kind of test clients on a Facebook group.

AS (06:19):
And I was like, Hey, like I see that you're like creating a ton of content already on your blog, but the content is not ranking really well now, would you like me to do some link building for you? So it started off really well. I've done a really good job with Describe, we got some results and then I was able to find more clients. So at that point I started doing a set of like basically like interviews. So I interviewed a bunch of SaaS founders and SaaS marketers to see what the main pain points were to try and better position the service. And that's where I found out that most companies have the content production and publishing like team in place, but they lack the promotion side essentially. So that's kind of like how I came to this positioning that we have now and kind of refined it basically.

DA (07:15):
You did a great job. I mean, this is a lot of times when we talk about ICP finding product market fit, it's those customer interviews. It's finding that pain point, it's finding the right positioning. And you're absolutely right about the SaaS industries and the knowledge of, you know, different services and marketing strategies. It is a much easier adoption method here, that say going to like lawyers or, you know, somebody that's more, like less technology focused, right? We're all technology enabled companies. So that's great. So let's actually talk about ideas, strategies and you're right. A lot of us, SaaS companies also have content creation because you know what, that's a big part of our brand. That's our voice. That's oftentimes like the first things that the marketing team is doing when they're coming in is building that organic strategy. But a lot of times what happens is we build it, we put the blog on social, maybe we'll promote it on social. You know, we'll do some guest posts and that's like our full content promotion and distribution strategy. At least that's how mine was when I first started in the content of Demio. So how are you helping your SaaS clients get more traffic and customers to their content? Like what, what do you recommend SaaS companies focus on when they start thinking about content promotion?

AS (08:22):
So, I mean, like there are like mainly three things that I will recommend SaaS companies to focus on from the very beginning. So the first one is that they should have like the main three pillars in place. So you should have content that's targeted keywords that have like search traffic potential because like, like what a lot of companies do that I'm seeing is that they publish like only articles maybe about like software updates and what's happening like in the industry. But those topics don't really have a lot of search volume and search intent as well. And so it's really important that the content that you publish is targeting keywords that have search traffic potential and that it has buyer intent or some kind of search attendant can lead like the people that find the content to buy your product. And so the second thing is that the content should also match the content type and the search intent.

AS (09:19):
So it's very important that the content you publish is matching what Google wants to rank, right? Because if, for example, for your target keywords, like all you see on the top 10 is blog posts and you have a sales page, for example, targeting the same keywords. It means that Google wants to rank basically blog posts or informational content. So you should try to mimic that same thing that you see in the top 10 results. And the last thing is that they should have like a content promotion strategy in place that works for them. So try to find like maybe that one channel that works for you and focus on that. And then once that becomes successful, then you can maybe expand and try different things. But like, yeah. One of the mistakes that I see a lot of companies do is that they try to do everything at once.

AS (10:12):
And so yeah, like when you do that, it's very difficult to find the one thing that works. And so you kind of get lost in the weeds there. And so in terms of what we do, we essentially have like two main core services. The first one, and that's like the main thing that we do for 90% of our clients is that we try to support the content production that they do with the quality manual link building outreach. So we take the content that they have. We try to find specifically the pages that have the most potential to rank higher with maybe just a couple of backlinks. So I take a look at the top 10, like ranking results. And let's say that they have a page that's ranking number eight. So the bottom of page one, I do analysis to see how many links that page kind of needs to rank higher and so on. So we essentially try to do like the 80/20 of link building, finding the pages that I call, like the quick win pages. So pages that have the most potential to rank higher in the short term. And then we essentially try, we basically keep working on those pages until they rank higher and then move to other pages that are ranking lower basically, and then like repeat, basically the same process over and over, essentially.

DA (11:31):
With those pages, is there a specific process that you're looking to get links to that page to rank them higher?

AS (11:39):
So essentially, like another thing that we do is we don't focus too much on specific tactics, but instead we came up with a framework that we can essentially use with all basically with all kinds of SaaS companies, because like one thing that I noticed in software companies is that most of them have the same four types of pages. So you have the homepage, which usually is ranking for like your main brand terms. And then you have your feature pages that are ranking for like specific problems or like basically the features that your product has. And then you have the blog articles, which is the informational content that's solving specific problems for people that might want to use the product. And then the last one is that you might have some linkable assets, maybe like an ebook or, or like an infographic and that kind of thing.

AS (12:39):
And so what we have found is that we can essentially like, instead of following a specific static like broken link building or guest posting, we have come up with a process that we can use for each of these four kinds of pages. So we essentially follow the same framework and we just like work on these four buckets of pages depending on what the clients wants to achieve but usually for the most part is the blog articles that we work on. But we also do specific campaigns, like the one that I want to talk about next, which is something that we started doing recently that I called the top list placement campaign. And so what we do with these campaigns is that we essentially try to get the clients placed in all of those articles that are ranking in the top 10 results for specific keywords that are important to them.

AS (13:34):
So usually these are something like, for example, let's say that my client is a cold email software. I might want to try and get them placed in all those articles that are like best top 10 cold email softwares, like for this and for that. And so what we do with the service is instead of focusing mostly on getting them backlinks for the SEO juice, we try to get them placed in sites where they could get some actual like referral traffic and actual customers from the content basically. So this is a specific process that we follow. We gather all of the keywords that are more like bottom and middle of the funnel for the clients. And usually these are divided into three main buckets. The first one is the competitor keywords. So we gather like all the names of their main competitors. Second one is essentially the main problems that the software solves.

AS (14:38):
And the third one is the main features that the software has. Then based on these keywords, we essentially scrape all of the size and pages that are ranking in the top 10 results for these specific keywords. And then we essentially try to reach out to these people to explain how and why the clients should fit inside this article. Because it makes sense ,because it's the right kind of too,l because maybe it's different. It has some kind of unique functionality and all of this kind of thing. So essentially like to recap, we do two things. First one is we support the client's content with continuous backlink outreach for the blog articles. And the second one is we try to get them placed in these list kind of articles to get referral traffic, basically.

DA (15:29):
When you're doing the list based to reach out. And I know exactly what you're talking about. It's like affiliate based articles. It's like best software for X keyword, right? How are you actually finding their contact information? How are you getting in front of them? I found that difficult in the past, you know, for Demio and stuff. When we initially started to do that. What is your strategy to find them and reach out to them and how do you incentivize them to actually do it? Sometimes they want things from me.

AS (15:53):
So to find the right contact information, and this is basically probably like 90% of the success is determined by this. Like, you really need to be in touch with like somebody that actually has the potential and the opportunity to edit like the content, for example. So instead of reaching out to like the VP of marketing or like the founder or someone like that, that basically doesn't care about your email. It's better like if you reach out to the editor or the author of the article, so sometimes it's a freelance writer. So even if the freelance writer is not working at that company, you can find maybe their contact information. Maybe they have a personal website where they sell like their freelance writing services. So you can essentially like reach out to these people basically from their personal website or on LinkedIn.

AS (16:53):
So it's just a matter of finding the best channel and reach out to the right people, basically at the right time as well. So it's very important to be timely with emails and to reach out to the person that can actually do something with your email and basically like with your request. And like timely, I mean, so if an article has been published three years ago, it's highly likely that they won't be editing it. Like, on the other hand, if the article has been published like two months ago, it might be like possible for them to edit it because it's still kind of fresh and they might want to keep it up to date. Right? So these are like the two main things that I suggest in terms of how to actually find emails, we use a couple of different tools. We use hunter.io, we use Applead and we use Pitchbox. So depending on the kind of email that you want to find, sometimes you can directly find it on the website when it's not on the website, you can use one of these tools that can essentially scour the internet to find the right email and verify for you as well.

DA (18:07):
That was a super thorough answer and really well thought out. So thank you. Because that's such a big strategy is like getting those people. Do you ever find that you have to incentivize them or is it mostly just positioning your product and the value and how it's going to help their article?

AS (18:21):
So, yeah, unfortunately with most of them you will have to incentivize them. Some people want like straight money, like a payment for the placement. And so in that case, we really want to make sure that the placement can be ROI positive for the client. And so they try to determine how much traffic the placement could, like bring them in, I don't know, three months, for example. And some people maybe they offer you like a placement for just like three, six or 12 months as well. So you need to make like your research and ask them like all the kinds of questions to make the placement, like worth it essentially. But for the most part, like, especially the fact that we work with software companies, the good thing about this is that we can offer the actual product, for example sometimes in exchange for the placement.

AS (19:15):
So some clients might offer a free trial or like an extended kind of free subscription or maybe even like a lifetime kind of subscription. So it's all a matter, as I said, of seeing if it can be basically ROI positive for you to do this. So think about it. Like if your software costs maybe 10 per month and you get a placement that can bring you X number of clients or sorry of customers that can cover that cost basically then it's ROI positive and you can do it. Some other times, it can be anything like link exchange well from your side. But yeah, for the most part is, is like things like this. So exchanges stuff that we can offer in return and as a last resort, it's money basically.

DA (20:07):
Got it. That's a super good answer. You know, that's really smart to be ROI positive, actually kind of go in with a little bit of marketing budget expecting that, or, you know, just some options that you have to incentivize with product, like you said. I think that's always been good for us too, because you know, getting people to utilize Demio and stuff like that has always been a great way for them to just see why it should also be on the site. So that is a really good piece of advice. And then when you're going into businesses, these SaaS companies, are you finding anything that people are doing mistakes that people are making in content promotion, distribution, ever going in and trying to fix what they've already done. Really this question is more around like, what should we avoid doing before we bring in an agency like you?

AS (20:48):
I mean like the main mistakes that I see companies do in terms of content promotion is that they don't do it. So, so essentially what a lot of companies do is that like maybe they start doing some link building some content promotion and distribution, and they essentially get to this point where maybe they think they have put out like 80% of the results and only gotten 20% like, basically the results from that, the problem with this is that they just decide to quit. And so what do they do? They essentially just keep, they decide to keep publishing content in the hope that it will rank basically just based on pure like research or the quality of the content. But the problem with this is that it usually doesn't work, especially in more competitive niches and industries. So you really need to have that extra kind of push that's done by the promotion.

DA (21:42):
That makes a lot of sense. I definitely feel like that was you know, us in the early days and, you know, we did things like try to get into growth hacker and posts on different social sites and (inaudible) and just like some of the basic distribution methods, but nothing with like an actual strategy of like the link building, how are we gonna get in those processes? And that kind of built over time for us. So we kinda got lucky there, but definitely a really smart thought process. And what about the other pages on the website? Let's say outside of, you know, the blog content itself, you have maybe competitive pages that you want to rank on your site or specific pages on specific keywords, or maybe you have sales pages, you know, are there specific types of content that works best for this type of content promotion? We're mostly talking about blog posts right now.

AS (22:25):
So I mean like, so what I like to do is I usually like to look at things with like a framework and not like, really look at like specific types. Cause there isn't really a specific type of content that works like better than the other. It's just a matter of seeing like what's out there because essentially Google that tells you what they want to rank basically. So look at what the others are doing. Try to be a little bit different and do things differently and better. So there are like, like actually like four or five, like qualities that I think good content should have to be able to succeed in promotion. And the first one is that it should be informational somehow, offer some kind of information that people can use, like basically to link to it. Second is that it should be visually appealing.

AS (23:16):
So like the problem with this is that people, unfortunately do judge a book by its cover. So if your content doesn't really look good, chances are the people are not even going to read it. Right. So you want to really make your content stand out, maybe have some custom graphics and like be readable and all of these kinds of standard stuff that, unfortunately like a lot of people still don't do. Like even now. The other thing is that it should be actionable. So you should provide some kind of value, some kind of insights that people can use. It should be unique in some way. So maybe have a different point of view, talk about a topic from a different perspective that other people are not doing. And lastly it should be mentionable so basically try to make it as easy as possible for people to cite specific information that you have inside the article.

AS (24:14):
So make like specific quotes stand out, like maybe for using like statistics or any kind of data, try to make it in a way that it's, basically that it really stands out that people can see it just by skimming the page so that they can grab that information and use it to link to your page. But these are like, to me, the main qualities that content should have to be able to work for content promotion in terms of, there's another thing that I wanted to mention is something that we recently started doing, which I call content injection. So basically like one thing that we've always found hard to do is to promote and build backlinks to sales pages. And unfortunately like a lot of SaaS companies are heavily focused on revenue, on new customers. Right. And so they want us to build backlinks to maybe specific sales pages that they have.

AS (25:12):
But the problem with this is that usually nobody wants to link to a sales page because it doesn't offer like basically any of the things that I just mentioned. Right. So it's usually not informational. It's usually not very visually appealing. It's not very actionable. Like the only thing that's actionable is a buy now button. Right. And so, so basically to avoid like avoid having to do the hard sell and try to push sales pages, like to people that we were reaching out to, we found something that just by looking at, I think it was QuickBooks. So we were doing some research and I came across a page from QuickBooks website. So what they were doing, it was really interesting. And essentially it was basically a sales page, I think about sales tax, like basically talking about their sales tax like feature and what they were doing in this page they essentially were using jump links, cleverly like hidden inside the page to basically like incorporate some kind of informational content within the sales page.

AS (26:25):
So basically like you had this classic landing page with like the main features and the buy now button and the pricing and all this stuff. But inside this page, you also had this jump links. So you clicked on one and the page would basically turn essentially like into a blog article and then you clicked on another one and it would turn into these kind of like, research piece with like an interactive map. And the last one, I think it was like a survey with like some more data. And the other cool thing about this is that you can use these jump links inside the URL, basically off the page. So that essentially like when you're reaching out to people for link building, basically like what you are pitching is like a URL and a page that's informational.

AS (27:18):
But in reality, the page is the same sales landing page that they had before. Just that with jump links, the URL gets basically modified. And so, basically like you're sending the link to the jump link informational URL, but at the same time, the link juice is also flowing to the sales page. So this is a very powerful kind of method. It's not super straightforward and you kind of need to have like the budget to do it as well in terms of like development. But it's something that's very clever that I think a lot of, a lot more companies should start doing.

DA (27:59):
You'll have to send over that page and we'll have to put them in our resources show notes because that's really interesting. And I definitely understand what you're talking about with like the jump links and stuff like that. So you're getting a background to the page, but you're going to the informational section, which makes it easier to get those backlinks.That's great. That's awesome. And what about toolkit? What do you guys use as your link building toolkit? Are there specific tools or, you know, SEO software that you recommend that everyone have in their arsenal?

AS (28:26):
So for the most part, we mainly use two tools only. We use Ahrefs which is like my main toolkit for everything SEO. I do it for everything that's like research to study the competitors, see what everyone's doing and for tracking as well. And then we use Pitchbox for outreach. So Pitchbox is like this very comprehensive kind of outreach platform. So you can do everything with it. You can essentially scrape the results of Google for specific keywords. You have projects and campaign, you can also connect it to Ahrefs so that you can automatically filter out sites based on SEO metrics like traffic, domain rating, and basically all of this kind of SEO metrics that you might want to use for quality. And then yes, it's basically allows you like also to automate, to kind of automate the email sequence. So you can create like up to three follow ups and you can send automatic kind of emails to people, you can do conditional logic. So you can do a couple of very clever things with it as well.

DA (29:39):
That's great. That's like a nice easy toolkit to have just those two powerful things. And obviously a lot of this is then the strategy and then just utilizing those tools tactically. So that's awesome. And the big question here for most people is, especially as marketers, like how do we show, you know, our teams, our leaders, the ROI in link-building like, we can talk about it, it's going out there. It's getting content promotion. Are we just looking at visitors? Should we be looking at you know, SERF rankings? Like, how are you measuring this? And how is maybe the teams that are, that you're working with specifically looking at those KPIs?

AS (30:14):
What do we do internally for clients essentially is we mainly focus on the quality first and second on the relevancy of the links. So for us internally is basically like reporting the quality of the links in terms of the traffic that the websites and the pages have. So we use a couple of different metrics like domain rating, traffic from the website, the kind of like the topic of the page to make sure that it's relevant to the client. But then basically it's also sometimes the referral traffic for those kind of top placement campaign that I said before, in case we have like a tracking link for those, we can also measure directly how many kind of leads that we bring to the clients. But for the most part, we try to stay focused on the quality and relevancy of the links and then like the rest, essentially, it's basically up to the clients. So what usually our clients do is that they can set goals and measure how many leads basically, the content specifically that we promote is bringing them. And so we just decide on the specific target pages that we work on every month, we send them to the clients so that they can set up like all their tracking in Google analytics and see what's going on there.

DA (31:34):
And for those of you who haven't used Ahrefs, like you have the ability to see those, the links and backlinks that you're building. So it's kind of easy to build those reports or to report on them basically. But, you know, I, when I first started online like 10, 12 years ago or whatever, I remember hiring people on Upwork and just getting like thousands and thousands backlinks but, you know, they're like terrible backlinks. They don't do anything for you. So it's not like always about the number of backlinks. It's mostly about the quality of those backlinks. So that's a really good point. And then looking over the past few years, as you worked in the SaaS industry, and you've worked on these promotions, any hard lessons, things that didn't work out as expected or missed opportunities?

AS (32:17):
So I mean like, the main thing, as I said is we definitely tried a lot to build backlinks to sales pages in the hope that we could do it, but it's very, very hard. So you really need like either to have a product that really stands out to be able to build backlinks to a sales page. So that just the product like speaks for itself, or you need to find some other clever ways, like I mentioned before. So the first mistake that we did I think is that we really tried to promise clients that we could build backlinks to sales pages, but unfortunately that's, it's basically very hard to guarantee. And so now we really try to stay focused more on the informational content that the client have basically, unless they really want us to work on those kinds of pages.

AS (33:08):
And so in that case, we can come up with a different strategy. The second thing in terms of mistakes, I would say for us as an agency, we tried for some time so kind of go out from our positioning. So we've had some offers from like affiliate websites and other people that are really like, were kind of desperate to work with us because they have like read about us and so on. And so we tried for a little while to kind of go out of our positioning and see like, if we could work with those kinds of companies, but really it's a whole, a lot of different, it's a very different kind of landscape. And when you go, especially like in affiliate marketing, it's all about paying for links, which we don't really like. And so, yeah, this is another mistake that we did.

AS (34:00):
We since went back to our core positioning and we trying to refine it as well now. So these are, I'd say like the main mistakes that we as an agency did. In terms of SaaS companies, I would say some kind of things that we we mentioned before. So try to like do everything at once and focus too much, maybe on specific tactics instead of finding like a framework that works for them. And so maybe they've seen somebody to broke backlinking, so they wanted to do broke backbuilding, but then they see that basically takes too long for them to do it because they don't really have a lot of like broke link pages like in their niche maybe that they can use. And so that's just one of the many kinds of mistakes that software companies do usually.

DA (34:55):
No, that's some really good lessons there, like three very tactical lessons, especially around, you know, staying like in your positioning, not over promising in your offerings, really, really smart stuff there that, you know, a lot of times we have to learn those things right. By making them, that's the way we all learn. So I guess looking forward, anything that you're excited about in 2021, anything's changing in the SEO landscape that presents a new opportunity?

AS (35:22):
So for us, as I said, the main kind of opportunity for us is to work with bigger companies because like so far we've, we work with companies that are profitable, not like super big or kind of enterprise company. So, so one thing that I would like to try and do, if, if we can, is to work with bigger companies to see if basically like, if our work can have some kind of impact with companies that are having like already maybe like thousands of links per month. Right. So in that case, it's kind of like for us, it's umber one of being able to increase the scale of the work that we do, because now for example, we can offer like anywhere from 10 to 50 links per month, like to the clients. So it's interesting to see like if we can find a way to scale this up and maybe get to like 50 or like a hundred, 200 links per month for our clients.

AS (36:21):
That's something that it's very kind of interesting and exciting for us to explore. So being able to increase the scale of our work to see like, basically if we can have an impact on these kind of bigger companies and in terms of the opportunities for the industry, I would say something that's really cool that I'm starting to explore is something that's called a GPT 3, basically that's like a pre-trained kind of AI model that uses like deep learning to produce basically some kind of human like text. So it's something that's very interesting to explore, especially if you use it well for emails, it can speed things up like super fast. And, but yeah, with everything that's including automation like you really need to be careful because you don't want to like do it too much. And especially nowadays with so many bad emails, it's really hard to be able to automate stuff while still keeping the human touch. Right. So this is also something else that we are basically, always trying to keep a balance in between being able to automate some of the more like mechanical work while at the same time, trying to sound human and sounding very good looking and sounding kind of emails to people.

DA (37:50):
Two amazing products that just came out with that new AI automation would be Broca B R O C A. It's a really good one. And then Conversion.ai, both utilize that kind of work through that flow to build those different campaign types built for marketers, highly recommend listeners, check them out. They'll save you a ton of times. So I think that's great advice. What I want to do now though, is I want to flip to our lightning round questions, five quick questions that you can answer with the first and best thought that comes to mind. You ready to get started?

AS (38:19):
Yep.

DA (38:20):
All right. Let's do this thing. What advice would you give for early stage SaaS companies starting marketing today?

AS (38:28):
So be like in this thing for the long term, because SEO especially is not quick. So be prepared to work on this, like at least six to 12 months, because it takes a long time.

DA (38:40):
Definitely great advice, be patient and understand that this thing takes time. Totally. What skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on today?

AS (38:50):
Since it's something that's in-between what we do every day, I would say cold email, basically outreach. And so that's because we see a lot of bad emails like around every day. Like it's really not so hard. It's just a matter of like sounding human. Be like relatable and genuine and, and have a good attention to details, especially. So, basically for example, not use capital letters just because it looks weird. See maybe something that somebody has posted on Twitter and make a reference to it so that it kind of stands out and like you may have the right person at the right time. That's essentially it.

DA (39:30):
I love that. So just more personalization and more care in that outbound process. Cause no one wants to be spammed in that process. What about a best educational resource you might recommend for learning about marketing or growth or maybe even SEO?

AS (39:42):
So I actually have two for these. So for SaaS specific marketing, I really like the Poweredbysearch blog. So Poweredbysearch. It is like a marketing agency for SaaS companies and they do amazing work on their blog. Everything that you want to learn about marketing for SaaS is there. So that's Poweredbysearch.com/blog and for everything SEO, I I'm a huge fan of Ahrefs. And so I really recommend their blog.

DA (40:11):
They have a great blog. It's a really great recommendation. What about a favorite tool that you can't live without? Maybe it's Ahrefs?

AS (40:17):
Favorite tool, so I wanted to actually mentioned something different. That's not like SEO related. So for this, I have a Roam Research, which is actually a note taking tool. And I basically use it as like my second brain. Let's say for everything that I do, that's kind of like admin, like related. I use it to organize my productivity and everything, and it's really a good tool. And they like promote themselves as the note taking tool for network thoughts. It's really interesting.

DA (40:50):
What was the name of that again? I want to write that down so that I get access to that.

AS (40:55):
So it's called Roam, R O A M research.

DA (41:02):
It looks great. Perfect. Thank you so much for that recommendation. And what about a brand, business or team that you admire today?

AS (41:09):
Yeah brand, business, team. So all of those, I will say Ahrefs, they do it like an amazing job. They are probably one of the only bootstrapped companies that like, have achieved a huge success. They do an amazing job at marketing, Tim Soulo as well the marketing manager now is a very good guy and very smart and yeah, I really admire like everything that they do.

DA (41:39):
Yeah, they do a great job. And I would say they're one of many great bootstrapped companies that made it, but they have done an incredible job being bootstrapped and creating a great product. And great marketing around it. But Alan I want to say, thank you so much for your time today. You shared a ton of tactical knowledge, real things that we can walk away with from this episode, but also the overall strategy, which I think is really key and was very enlightening to me. So thank you for your time and your wisdom today.

AS (42:07):
Yeah, no problem and David it's been great. Thanks for having me.

DA (42:10):
Yes, absolutely. Thanks again, Alan. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

AS (42:14):
See you. Talk soon.
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