Getting someone to respond to an ice cold email can be tough. In fact, maybe you’ve heard — or thought: “Cold email is dead. It’s SPAM! Stick a fork in it. Within five years, something new is going to replace email.” I’ve heard these complaints a lot. But I disagree. What makes me so sure? Everything I’ve achieved in my career, I’ve achieved … through cold email.  (If you don’t have time to read the entire article you can listen to the audio version of it right here.) I took a startup from 0 to 40M page views and sold it to Google … through cold email. I’ve published 1400+ guest posts and ..read more

Should you do your own PR? If you’re a startup or a small business owner, hiring a PR company is not practical. It’s far simpler (not to mention inexpensive) to do your own PR. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do your own PR: Search Google News to find articles related to the topic you’d like to pitch Verify this article is relevant to the topic you’re pitching Find the name of the journalist and the publication they write for Write the email subject line Construct the body of the email Find the email address of the reporter Reach Out! Not too long ago Kevin Leu wrote an article on Vent ..read more

If there’s one thing that’s essential to sales it’s writing clear, concise and effective emails when asking customers for business. According to Campaign Monitor we send and receive 121 business emails every day,  that number goes up for people with more responsibility at an organization. The funny part is that the majority of these emails suck. For example take a look at the following email Pete Caputa CEO of Databox received not too long ago:   Subject: Peter, before the weekend Hi Peter, I’ll be reaching out to you on the phone in the next couple of days/next week but I wanted to ..read more

Can you get traffic and paying customers by targeting low search volume traffic keywords? If yes, how low can you go and still land customers? 200 searches/month? 100 searches/month? Can you go as low as zero searches/month and get customers? These are the questions I asked myself when I started this SEO case study. Most people take the traditional keyword strategy when starting an SEO campaign. They aim for mid‐to‐high volume keywords, create content, and spend endless months battling it out for the first page. This approach works, but it’s hard, expensive and ever so often, fails spectacular ..read more

Can you get traffic and paying customers by targeting low search volume traffic keywords? If yes, how low can you go and still land customers? 200 searches/month? 100 searches/month? Can you go as low as zero searches/month and get customers? These are the questions I asked myself when I started this SEO case study. Most people take the traditional keyword strategy when starting an SEO campaign. They aim for mid‐to‐high volume keywords, create content, and spend endless months battling it out for the first page. This approach works, but it’s hard, expensive and ever so often, fails spectacular ..read more

As a SaaS business owner, you want an affordable – yet effective – PR plan. You know the value of a good PR strategy. It helps you get media coverage, builds your brand, and attract the potential customer. However, spending tons of money on hiring a public relations agency is also not an option. When you’re a small SaaS startup, you don’t have that kind of money! What’s the solution? In this post, I’ll show you some practical ways to generate PR traction for your SaaS business without shelling out the big bucks. 5 Simple, Yet Effective SaaS PR Strategies When it comes to SaaS PR, it pays to ke ..read more

Your press release is finally done. You spent hours trying to make it perfect. And now it’s ready. But your work isn’t finished! You now have the tough task of sending press releases to journalists. In this article, I’ll help you craft the perfect pitch email for your press release. I’ll also give you a few helpful email templates to give you a head start. Before I start, I’m assuming you have your press release and your list of media contacts ready. You can’t send a press release email without a press release and media contacts to send it to, right? If you don’t have it, check out my “How To ..read more