Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is Dave Schneider.
Dave is the co founder of Ninja Outreach, a SaaS prospecting and outreach tool which was created to streamline the process of connecting with influencers.
Before founding Ninja Outreach, Dave ran a travel blog that did over six figures a year.
Today, we're going to take everything that Dave's learned about influencer marketing and teach you how to apply that to your own business.
You'll learn how you can find and work with influencers in your market and use those relationships to grow your brand and generate more leads and customers for your SaaS product.
And with that, let's bring on Dave.
Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave (01:08.200)
Thanks a lot.
It's great to be here.
Omer.
Omer (01:10.040)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but let's talk a little bit more about your background.
How did you get into building this travel blog in the first place?
Dave (01:25.560)
It's a bit of a long sort of convoluted story.
I guess if we're going go way back here.
Pre2010, I'm at Harvard, I'm a college student, I'm a math major and I'm thinking about my next steps in terms of career.
And I ended up getting a job at Capital One, which is a finance sort of finance company in the U.S. as a business analyst.
And I moved out of D.C. with my girlfriend and the both of us were working corporate nine to fives, which I'm sure your audience can relate with pretty heavily.
And similarly, we felt that we wanted to do something a little different.
We didn't really feel very fulfilled in our work and we wanted to go travel.
So we planned a two year backpacking trip around Europe and Asia and we said we're going to work for two years, we're going to save up as much money as we can, we're going to pay off our debt, we're going to plan our route and we're going to get going.
And we're also going to start a travel blog because why not?
You know, it's a way to kind of keep friends and family in touch.
It's a way to maybe earn a little bit of money on the road, get some sponsored trips and also just gives us something to be productive while we're on the road.
So we started this travel blog it was about February of 2012, while at that time I was still working and we were just kind of doing it on the side nights and weekends, designing it, writing content, guest posting, doing all the things that kind of first time bloggers do.
And then after a few months in September, when we finally set off on our trip and we were kind of live, that's when things started to kind of get interesting.
Omer (02:54.080)
Well, I would say first time bloggers don't do that stuff.
I mean, first time bloggers probably write like, like me, I'd probably write like two blog posts and then forget about it.
Right.
Because it was too much hard work.
But you put a lot more into it.
Dave (03:06.340)
That's true.
I think we had the vision from the beginning that we were going to try to make some money from the travel blog.
We had no idea how much we could potentially make, honestly.
We thought if we could make maybe a few thousand dollars in the first two years, that would be an extreme help to our savings and our traveling through Asia.
So we did approach it like it was going to be a business up.
And as a result, you know, we were reading all the, all the articles, you know, from Neil Patel and people like that to try to understand what you should do as a first time blogger to get traction.
Omer (03:38.960)
Got it?
Yeah, yeah.
Neil was a guest on episode four of this show, one of the very first guests, and he's got that, that million dollar blog challenge going on at the moment.
Have you been following that?
Dave (03:52.960)
I have.
A post just came out today and he's trying to get, I think was like 100 grand a month or something from his nutrition blog.
And he's already, he's already up to like thousand Facebook likes and tens of thousands of visitors a month.
It's only month two.
I'm trying to follow along with how he does it.
He makes it seem so simple and I'm just kind of banging my head against the wall.
Omer (04:12.300)
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's like I saw that this morning and I was like, how did he get to a hundred thousand likes in just two months?
So anyway, let's get back to the topic for today.
So.
So let's get started.
And do you want to just give the audience kind of a quick overview of what you're going to cover today?
Dave (04:37.770)
Yeah, absolutely.
So what I was thinking about talking about is firstly influencer marketing, which is a term that some people might be familiar with, but I suspect many do not.
Then we're going to get into how do you find influencers, ways to partner with influencers.
Pitching them.
And then finally talk about some software success stories from other great software companies who are doing influencer marketing and really kind of getting traction from it.
But before we get into those bullet points there, I wanted to talk about kind of like the age that we're living in a little bit, which is the age of the smart consumer, where people know how to do research now, they know how to look for recommendations.
I went on my Facebook recently and literally, I think it was the third one down.
My friend Jackie was posting, hey, every time I go onto Craigslist, it's a scam.
How do people find apartments?
I must be missing something here.
And she's looking to kind of find an apartment in Cambridge.
And this is kind.
This is what people do.
This is their sort of gut reaction when they need help.
They go and ask people that they know, people that they can trust.
And often this is friends and family.
But the scope of knowledge of friends and family is only so much.
Right, so who are the other people that they trust?
You know, when you can't just go to friends and family, People go to retail sites, they go to brand sites, but they also go to blogs, and they go to social media like Facebook, you know, groups and forums, YouTube, LinkedIn.
These are the communities where people kind of want to throw out questions and get real answers.
And this is kind of how they make their purchasing decisions.
So this is essentially how we get into influencer marketing and what it really is.
And influencer marketing, I think of is really a marketing channel.
Think of it like paid advertising.
Think of it like outbound email.
It's a marketing channel where really the channel is, you know, a blogger or a social media enthusiast.
You know, this is sort of juxtaposition where I'm sure many of us have been in a situation where you see tons of bloggers, journalists, social media experts, and they have this.
They've attracted this large audience.
They have, you know, people commenting, engaging with them.
And then there's kind of us in our business and we're kind of just trying to get off the ground.
And we've been putting a lot of focus into our business and our product and providing a good service, but we haven't had as much time to really kind of generate an audience.
And that's where we think, is there a way that we can leverage this combination to really benefit both people in a way that is almost like a shortcut?
I sometimes say that the quickest way to go from 0 to 60 in a car is to hop on a car.
That's already going 60 miles per hour.
Can I just kind of onboard with somebody else there?
That's really what influencer marketing is.
There's a Great graph from HubSpot where they talk about inbound versus outbound marketing.
HubSpot, great software company based in Cambridge, they're all about inbound marketing, which is how do we not interrupt people in their regular day when they're not really looking to make a purchase?
But how do we situate ourselves conveniently where when they're finally looking for the software that they're looking to buy and help their business, we're there.
How do we kind of appear there?
And that's things like SEO, that's things like press and public relations, but it's also influencer outreach.
That's really kind of what this is about.
So if you can kind of understand influencer marketing and you can kind of understand that there are certainly some benefits to this marketing channel, why is influencer marketing good for software companies?
What makes it good for them?
Because like all marketing channels, there's certain aspects that make it relevant for certain types of businesses and not relevant for others.
There's really two reasons why I really like influencer marketing for software companies.
The first is that their audience is often online or really does their purchasing online.
A lot of software is digital, so people, when they go, they really turn to the web.
They're not going to show up to a brick and mortar store and look to buy software.
That just doesn't happen anymore.
And influencers, when we talk about bloggers, social media enthusiasts, they're all online, their audience is online.
So that's a really nice kind of pairing there.
The second thing is that software business inherently have a really low marginal cost per user.
So it doesn't really cost that much to say, give out a free version of their software, to give away copies, to give a free account to an influencer.
And that gives them a lot of power when they're trying to form partnerships as opposed to.
I've talked with people who are in the fashion industry and you know, they want to get their perfume reviewed by a blogger, but it costs $100 just to kind of ship a bottle and allow the influencer to kind of use it.
So this is a high upfront cost of that.
So those are kind of the two reasons why I really like influencer marketing for software and why we use it for our own business.
Omer (09:58.960)
What is the goal with reaching out to these influencers?
Are we trying to get them to promote our product through some kind of affiliate program?
Are we trying to get them to become fans or mention the product, or is it all of those things?
Dave (10:14.880)
It's a little bit all of the above, to be honest.
You know, the end goal is really not the influencer himself and say, I'm trying to get this person to sort of buy my product, but can I get them to promote me to their audience?
Where they either mention you in a post, they put you on their resources pages, they do a product review, send you out to their newsletter, they become an affiliate, all these different types of things, just to kind of get exposure to the thousands of people that follow them daily.
Omer (10:40.220)
Okay, got it.
Dave (10:42.700)
So easier said than done, right?
How do we sort of go about finding influencers?
Because it's not always that simple.
And the first thought process that I'm sure most of us have is to go to a Google search and to type in something like marketing blogs.
Maybe.
I run a digital marketing software, so I'm looking for people that have marketing blogs and their audience is relevant to my sort of end user and how can I kind of work with them.
And you can absolutely do that.
You can go into Google, you can type in marketing blogs, and you're going to find posts that are top lists about top 25 marketing blogs, you're going to find other people who identify themselves as marketing blogs, and you can kind of really just go one by one and find them.
And this is a great way to get started, but it doesn't scale very well.
It doesn't scale that well in the sense that if you want to find 100 or 1000 influencers, Google is really not the place to sort of go for this.
Google does not organize contact information.
It doesn't give you an RSS feed so much.
So it's a great way to start, but it probably won't scale very well.
So another thing I recommend is commenters.
Commenters are.
If you think about where do influencers really kind of come out of the woods and reveal themselves?
A lot of us are commenting on other people's blogs.
If I write an article and I get 20 comments, those are potentially 20 influencers who are clearly engaging with that content.
That's kind of another way to go about and find influencers.
Similarly, with commenters, we have linkers.
Linkers are people that they linked to a particular post or website.
So as an example, let's say I find an article about blogger outreach, because that's a keyword and a topic that I'm interested in.
I can take that article about blogger outreach.
I can put it in a tool like Ahrefs or, or Moz and find all the people that link to that article.
And these are potential influencers who would be interested in maybe working with me because they've clearly expressed an interest in blogger outreach by linking to that post.
Another is, and this is sort of so you've got Google search, you've got commenters and you've got linkers, and the next is really to kind of go into basically search engine tools that are really designed to be influencer search engines.
One that's really popular and well liked is called buzzsumo.
Buzzsumo is a nice search engine where you can put in marketing blogs again and they look for the top rated content in that niche and they give you information about the author and things like that that you can kind of much more quickly scale your influencer marketing.
Another one would be basically to go to Follower Wonk.
I'm just talking about some different tools here.
By the way.
Follower Wonk is a Moz tool and what it it's mainly Twitter.
It's essentially a Twitter search engine where you can type in again, for example, marketing blogs.
And you're going to find all the people on Twitter who have written in their bio something like marketing blogs.
And you can imagine with Twitter if you've only got a couple sentences at most to put in your bio, if you're going to identify yourself as a marketing blogger, that must be really special to your personality.
You're probably an influencer in that space.
What's nice about these types of tools is they bring in other metrics like the number of followers they have, the number of social shares they have that give you some sort of a benchmark as to how influential this person is.
Because once you start to move into these different tools like BuzzSumo and follower wonk and things like that, it isn't hard at all to find thousands of people who you could potentially reach out to.
Now it becomes kind of the difficulty is how do I sort through them, how do I search them and how do I kind of 8020 to find the ones that are most relevant to what I'm looking for and potentially most impact.
And of course the last one I'll mention is Ninja Outreach and this is full disclosure.
This is our software and it's an influencer marketing database.
Again, you can kind of put in marketing blogs or any other keywords you're looking for.
And basically we're going to pull up a bunch of influencers, their contact information and allow you to reach out to them.
Through email.
And that's sort of the different ways.
Omer (15:15.830)
What kind of data do you have available in Ninja Outreach?
Where does it come from?
Dave (15:20.190)
Sure, the data that we have available, we have over 20 different metrics that we bring in.
SEO metrics like page rank, domain authority, traffic engagement, like Alexa, visitors per post, social shares, things like that.
And of course, we have contact information, location, and their social media profiles.
So we try to bring all that in in one to really kind of just speed up the process.
You know, you can imagine how long it would take to go to that website and find all this key information like that.
And the way we get that information is through a lot of different APIs.
APIs, WHOIS lookup things like that.
And we just bring it all together around a single website and influencer.
Omer (15:57.930)
Got it.
So I want to try to make this a little bit more real.
Maybe we can talk about an example as we go through this.
I didn't have anything in mind, but it just kind of made me think about this as we talk through this.
So one thing that's taking up a lot of my time at the moment is that I just launched the SaaS product as well, which is called Presto Product Pod.
And this was.
This was built out of my frustration of publishing my own podcast.
Right.
I mean, once you.
Once you finish recording, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you need to do about adding ID3 tags to the MP3 file, distributing it to the endpoints like Libsyn.
You want to host where you're going to host this file.
You want to create show notes, pages.
And so eventually we kind of built this, this product to kind of automate that process.
So when I think of.
And that just launched a couple of weeks ago.
So if I'm thinking about that maybe as an example here, who would be my influences?
Would I be looking for podcasters who are maybe just well known or have really popular podcasts?
Or would I be looking for people like John Lee Dumas, somebody who has a great podcast, but also is building the resources and providing the tools to help people launch their own podcasts?
Is that the kind of people I would be looking for with my outreach?
Dave (17:30.660)
Yeah, exactly.
And of course, there's sort of levels of maybe who is a good fit, and the top level is somebody obviously like a John Lee Dumas who has a podcast so he can actually benefit from the software, but actually his audience is podcasts to a large degree, because he does podcasters paradise and other things like that.
And there are several other podcasters, Marin I can't recall his last name, but he sort of does podcasts for podcasters.
And so if you can sort of connect with them by specifically looking for entrepreneur podcasts, things like that, if they can then sort of represent you to their audience and say maybe you kind of.
They'll feature you as a.
Become an affiliate or maybe do a giveaway, things like that.
Absolutely.
You can kind of get in touch, featured for their audience to then kind of grow your company.
And in addition, even if they are maybe not doing podcasting for podcasters, because that's relatively niche, anybody who's still doing a podcast has, I think, the potential to sort of be relevant to the audience that you're looking for.
Because a lot of people who listen to podcasts get inspired to start their own, and therefore, you know, it's maybe not an ideal fit, but it's still something worth kind of going for.
So if I were you, I would be looking to kind of connect with people who are starting podcasts and have an audience that might be doing so as well.
Omer (19:00.040)
Okay, great.
So now we have a bunch of different tools from the simplest being something like doing a Google search, to sort of gradually a little bit more sophisticated like BuzzSumo, which.
Which is going to help you, I guess, not to, well, indirectly identify influences, but also relevant content where you have an opportunity to connect with as well.
And then ninja outreach, obviously, being another tool which pulls this together.
And I think the main thought that was going through my head when you were talking about this was it doesn't seem that hard to generate a list of influencers.
And in fact, I would say that is the problem.
Right.
Because now I can see myself having, let's say, a list of a couple of thousand influencers.
Where do I start?
How do I make sure that I'm going after the most important ones first?
Right.
So I guess there's this process of doing some kind of ranking or filtering or whatever to sort of figure that out.
I think you mentioned something about, is that the next step of what we're going to talk about?
Dave (20:19.810)
Yeah, that's exactly.
That's the right question to be asking.
Right.
You sort of understand that finding thousands of influencers with the right tools is not that hard.
Right.
But then what?
Great, I've got a list of a thousand people, but I have no results at that point.
So how do I kind of go about and really partner with them and make progress here?
And just firstly, to talk about the concept of partnering with influencers online, you know, it's really not altogether that different from how you would try to partner with somebody offline?
You know, how do you.
How do you get somebody to kind of work with you?
Right?
And usually it's sort of you have to give.
You have to do something for them.
Right?
So the one distinction here with influencer marketing is there's really three people involved.
It's not just you, it's not just the influencer, but it's also their audience.
And it's the intersection of all those three that really creates a winning situation.
You know, if you just give something to the influencer, but you have nothing to offer their audience, well, the influencer doesn't look so good when he kind of presents you to his audience.
And likewise, if you just kind of offer something to the audience, but you're not willing to give anything to the influencer, they're not really going to want to work with you.
So one way that we go about it, and there's really a lot of different ways, is we offer the influencer to be an affiliate as part of our program, and we have an affiliate program.
They're not too, too hard to kind of create.
This gives them an opportunity to make money on their sales.
And we also free access or free copies to their audience in the form of maybe like a giveaway or just some sort of competition, things like that.
And this goes back to the point where I said of it's not altogether a huge marginal cost to offer, you know, have some users kind of using the software.
In fact, generally it's a good thing because it gives.
It's just another person using the software who might mention it to a friend, and that friend can then become a paying customer.
So in general, I mean, this is why people have freemium programs, right?
So it's great to kind of just give away as many as you can, as long as you can handle the customer support and things like that.
That's sort of really kind of the methodology behind partnering with influencers.
But before that, it really comes down to sort of engagement.
I'll be honest.
I think everybody's sort of gut reaction is to take that list of 1,000 people that you have and just send out emails one by one or in bulk and just take whatever comes back.
I'll take 2% of people say yes, and now I didn't do that much and everything like that.
And I think at one stage or another, we've probably all sent kind of emails in bulk and stuff like that.
But honestly, if you can take the time to start engaging with the influencers, you'll go a lot farther.
So the first step is, like you said, how do we kind of rank these guys in a way that kind of says this one is sort of worth going after?
And it's important not to just pick the top dog right away.
I'm going to go off to John Lee Dumas because he has the most popular podcast, and if I can get him, you know, whatever there's.
I like to think of it almost as if.
Almost like you're working your way up the ladder.
Maybe I can get, you know, some people of somewhat lesser influence to kind of talk about me, and that then allows me to kind of go the next level up and kind of say, hey, look, I just worked with this other guy, and I think that you'd be a great fit as well, and sort of work my way up to Lauderdale to the point that, you know, the top of the influencer wants to talk about you because they've seen all the other people talking about you, and they don't want to be sort of late to the game and kind of publicizing this.
Omer (23:52.820)
So it's kind of a little bit like the same approach to PR as well, right?
I mean, yes, you're not going to get TV coverage or network news right away.
You're probably going to start with some local newspaper maybe, and then if the story is interesting enough and you start to build some traction, you could end up being on.
On network television at some point.
Dave (24:12.580)
Absolutely.
In a lot of those large publications like TechCrunch, they.
They get their stories sometimes from just smaller ones where, you know, hey, I thought this story looked really interesting.
It's not that out because this person that publicized it is kind of relatively small in terms of audience, and they kind of jump on that and they make it a thing.
And so it's really like a similar approach to pr.
Now, in terms of the metrics that really matter to you, it really does depend on kind of the business and the influencer.
And you can kind of.
We can talk about follower accounts, we can talk about number of comments and social engagement.
We can talk about traffic.
Personally, I like engagement metrics.
I like somebody that has an audience that comments a lot.
I like somebody that has an audience that shares their posts on a lot.
Because I've been in plenty of situations where a very high traffic website really just did not convert all that well because the audience is just not really that.
It's not really an engaged audience that just, I guess, get a lot of traffic from various sources that kind of bounce.
But with metrics, it's really, my advice is not to go overly overboard.
Basically pick a metric that you think is sort of relevant and kind of rank them that way and then sort of go after them in that way.
You can kind of, you know, start with a good group of influencers that kind of meet your requirements and then start asking for, you know, well, start engaging with them.
And when I talk about engagement, I mean, how can we provide value to them?
How can we do little things?
We comment on their posts, sign up for their newsletter, let them know that we're there.
We can tweet their stuff, follow them on social media, link to them in posts.
You know, it's a, it's a process.
You're talking about building relationships with people.
It's not necessarily, necessarily done overnight, but once you do get there, once you build a relationship with someone, you pretty much, you know, you have that for as long as you're willing to kind of keep up a little minimal engagement to make sure that, you know, you're still kind of showing that you're there.
So it can take several weeks to kind of start to engage with the influencers.
And that's why when it comes to influencer marketing, it's great to really think ahead.
You know, it isn't like paid advertising where you can set up a campaign on day one and just let it go, is more of a thought process.
But you know, it, you know, but it has the benefits of honestly tends to be free.
You know, it's a sort of, it tends to be a free marketing channel and has a lot of long term benefits.
So when you do that, the last, you know, you start to think about what are the types of partnerships that are going to be useful for me.
And you know, the ones that I've highlighted are things like guest posting, which kind of falls a little bit under content marketing and influencer marketing.
Content marketing, they definitely shift.
They kind of operate under the same roof a little bit.
But guest posting is when you write on somebody else's website and then you get to sort of feature yourself to their audience.
And I've done dozens of guest posts.
Another one is giveaways and product reviews, which I really like again because like I said, the low marginal cost of software affiliates is.
Omer (27:18.990)
Tell me what you mean by product reviews in the context of an influencer.
Dave (27:24.150)
Sure.
It's essentially saying, would you like to review this product?
Would you like to sign up for this account and write a story about us?
I really like product reviews because they put your product front and Center.
You know, a guest post can be about a little bit about anything and usually you get a link in the alter bio and you get a little bit of notice.
But when you get a product review it says, hey look, we're going to be talking about NINJA outreach today and we're going to be highlighting all its features and functionality.
And you know, people can ask questions in the comment, you can respond to that.
It's really a great way to kind of just be out there and it works.
It can work particularly well for the influencer as well because more likely to convert sales for them if they're an affiliate.
A quick thing about affiliates, I always try to get influencers to be signed up as an affiliate when possible and I know that not everybody has an affiliate program, but I do think it's a nice investment because when somebody signs up to be your affiliate they're making sort of a long term commitment to feature you.
Not just in the one off request where maybe you've asked for a guest post or a product review, but they're going to mention you in other posts that they write that are relevant.
They're going to put you on their resources page, they're going to send you on the newsletter.
They're trying to make sales.
Right.
That's why they signed up.
So with anything that you do guest posting giveaways, product reviews, always try to offer an affiliate program as well if you can.
Omer (28:41.880)
What platforms or solutions would you recommend people looking at if they are thinking about setting up an affiliate program?
Dave (28:49.960)
Sure, I will say that the one that we did was in house, it was custom because we had some old code that we leveraged.
But the popular ones are things like shareasale, Commission Junction.
And the way these essentially work is they take a commission based off off of any sort of sales that get made.
But what they bring to the table is ease of use, quick sign up a marketplace where people can sort of organically find your affiliate program and sign up and just an easy way to handle payment processing.
Omer (29:17.320)
I know those guys are pretty well used for info products, but would they work equally as well for a SaaS product?
Dave (29:27.560)
I think that they can.
You're right, they're absolutely more info product heavy.
But I don't know, I guess of some great software specific affiliate ones.
There's also sort of marketplaces like JVZoo and Warrior Forum that I think kind of also have.
They have their own sort of affiliate things and those also are great for info products, but I think they do software too.
Omer (29:52.190)
Okay.
Dave (29:54.750)
Lastly, I guess back to types of partnerships, aside from kind of the big heavy hitters, like a guest post or giveaway is simply asking for things like social media exposure or a link.
You know, do that all the time.
A lot of you mentioned you have kind of a podcaster's software.
Even if you weren't necessarily trying to get mentioned in the podcast, is it something that they would be interested in linking to in their resources page?
I do a lot of resource page outreach where you can fairly easily in Google using their search operators, looking for Inurl resource page and then combine that with your keyword and find a bunch of resource pages for podcasters and online marketers and things like that.
And then say, hey, look, I've got a great resource here.
My software product, would you be interested in adding it to the page?
And we also have an affiliate link and most people are very receptive to that because that page is built to show off resources.
It's really not intrusive at all.
So just another way that I kind of like to do things.
Omer (30:53.750)
Yeah, that's a great one in terms of using the resource page and I've used that in the past for other things and.
And I give credit to Brian Dean from Backlinko for learning a lot of that stuff.
And I think he has some great resources there as well in terms of the types of emails that you can send out to people and almost take it step by step.
So we're including a link to that in the show notes as well, if people want to follow up and get more info.
Dave (31:15.540)
Yeah, it's definitely been sort of one of the ways we've been working things.
So you've found a bunch of influencers, you've ranked them in sort of a particular order that matters to you.
You've decided up front what is the type of partnership you're going to be going after.
And eventually you have to sort of write a pitch and believe it or, you know, as easy as it sounds, you know, writing an email to somebody.
I've seen, you know, the worst types of pitches in my day where, you know, I had this example here in the slide and, you know, Donna wrote her subject was her name.
You know, I don't even know how that happens.
And the, you know, the English isn't really proper and it's just really kind of scattered and things like that.
And it's just.
It's an easy way to end up in the spam folder right away.
So I certainly caution you to avoid that, but there's really not too much to it.
You know, personalizing it just even, you know, if somebody's got a name, please use it.
You know, being upfront about what you're asking for.
You know, I don't like to kind of beat around too much and say, hey, look, I'd like to do a guest post on your website.
You know, just kind of call that out very quickly, keeping it succinct.
I've had people send me things, which is paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs.
And sometimes we're trying to oversell ourselves a little bit.
We're trying to provide too much authority.
And here's my resume and here's my LinkedIn profile and here's where I was featured.
And it just becomes a bit of an oversell, right?
So I think keep it succinct.
And then of course, like we mentioned, finding that overlap between the audience, the influencer and yourself, where you're providing something of value to everybody, making sure you kind of call that out.
I always bullet point in my pitches and I say, this is what I can do for you.
We've got an affiliate program that has 50% commissions.
I can give you a free year of the license and I can give you several free copies to give away.
And just make it very clear that, hey, look, I know you're doing something for me and I'd like to do something for you.
And this is sort of my best value that I can offer.
And a lot of us, if you're bootstrapped and you don't really have money to kind of pay for these types of things, this can be enough.
I mean, we haven't paid for any exposure that we've had.
We do it also just kind of, like I said, affiliate programs and free copies and things like that.
So the way I wanted to kind of end was talking about a few success stories and making sure that people were aware that people are doing this.
This is not some crazy new thing that I just cooked up today, but that some of the largest software, largest, most well known software companies are doing this.
One of the ones that I really like is Great Groove.
Groove is a customer support software.
They've been around for, I think only about two years or so.
They have an awesome blog that has some great content.
If you read one of their earlier posts, they write about sort of how they did influencer marketing.
Alex, the founder, goes, nearly a month before we launched the blog, we began building a list of influencers who we wanted to build relationships with.
We began engaging with with them later once they knew we existed and saw us as contributors, we sent them a small ask.
That small ask was, hey, look, would you mind sharing, would you mind coming over and commenting, things like that?
It's exactly what we talked about today, Omer, about finding a list, engaging with them and then after providing value, coming up with a small ask.
And within five weeks they had about 5,000 subscribers, which is obviously a huge success story.
It's not something that I want to say everybody can replicate that, but this is the methodology and it can work.
Another is Buffer.
Buffer, also a very well known SaaS application for social media sharing.
And they really hit guest blogging very hard in the early days.
And their first hundred thousand users, they claim, were acquired in nine months of running Buffer from Guest Post.
One of their co founders, Leo, just, I mean, he was, he was just churning out post after post.
And again, this is a bit content marketing, but it's influencer marketing where you've got to find the relevant guest post.
You've got to find out which ones are going to be the ones that are kind of going to be going to send me the most bang for my buck.
They're going to send me a lot of traffic and who are going to be interested in working with me.
He wrote 150 guest posts and that did quite well.
Omer (35:39.380)
I would add that I think content marketing is getting so saturated now with just so much content out there.
If you want to get a guest post opportunity on a blog that really matters, you probably want to be doing some of the other things that you've talked about and starting to get on their radar and signing up for their list and sharing their content and doing a lot of those things before you go and even ask for a guest post opportunity.
Right.
Whereas in the past maybe you didn't have to do any of that stuff.
You, if you could just send a mail and get a chance to have your post published there.
Dave (36:16.860)
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, especially like you said, the ones that you kind of obviously want to go after are the top publications, but those are the ones that everyone wants to go after.
And because content marketing is so hot right now, they get a lot of inbound guest post requests.
And, you know, it's the people that differentiate themselves early on by engaging with them, signing up with the newsletter that can kind of get them to that point.
And I like to think of relationships almost as a bit like a funnel where maybe day one is where I start engaging with them.
Day two, not literally day two, but kind of like step two is where maybe I'll go and try to do a guest post.
And if that goes well, day three, I might see if they'd be down for a webinar and just kind of lead myself to some sort of more and more engaging, interactive way to kind of go with their audience and just kind of of keep leveraging that same relationship as opposed to trying to kind of build a new one, which has a lot of upfront cost, but just kind of how can I get more and more associated and known with their audience?
Because when you think about how people buy, it's usually not on impression number one, right?
It's usually when they've seen you a few times.
So basically kind of going down that relationship funnel is kind of one strategy that I recommend.
And I guess also I should put a little bit.
Put a little bit of my money where my mouth is with how have we done this with Ninja Outreach?
How is it really going?
And I'll say that we pretty much exclusively do influencer marketing.
It's in partly because we believe in the channel and we have this nice software that helps us out, but also because we want to be close to the ground, we want to be in the trenches, and we want to know what's going on and how the field is evolving so that we can adjust our own products.
Qualitative.
I get emails on a weekly basis where I have this example here, and this lady said, hey, look, I don't usually reach out to help promote products, but I've heard some great stuff about your software from Adam Connell, swears by you guys would love to participate.
Adam Connell is the blogger from Blogging Wizard.
He has an awesome blog, certainly Influencer in the blogging space.
This was sort of an inbound request that we received and she started writing about us just like that because she trusted Adam and wanted to be a part of it.
Similarly, quantitatively, I have this Google Analytics chart and we launched in January and that was really when we started to do the blogger outreach and the Influencer marketing campaign.
A lot of what we had done before that was kind of like direct email, lead generation, things like that.
We essentially doubled our traffic in about a month or two by doing a lot of.
We did probably over 30 guest posts and product reviews.
We got a lot of resource page mentions, a lot of social shares like.
Like that.
And you know, recently, I guess now it's about June or so, and we're up to about 9,000 or so sessions a month.
So we've also kind of continued to climb it and hold it.
So certainly, you know, influencer marketing has Been working, you know, well enough for us, and I believe it really can work for a lot of people.
Omer (39:18.120)
Awesome.
So tell me a little bit more about what you guys.
So you bet.
You guys are basically using NINJA Outreach to do your outreach, to get influencers talking about an outreach product, right?
Dave (39:34.250)
Yeah, we've sort of built this tool that kind of helps sell itself, right?
Omer (39:38.330)
Yeah.
So tell me more about the product and how it could help people or maybe make this process of doing outreach easier.
Dave (39:50.890)
Yeah, absolutely.
And the thing about software is it is just that, right?
It's software, it's a tool, somebody has to use it.
It's not a done for you service.
So it's not the whole everything's sort of one and done there.
But what NINJA Outreach does help you do is really scale your outreach efforts by allowing you to kind of find and identify the key influencers in your space, get the contact information, get the key metrics that are going to allow you to kind of 8020 it a bit.
And then we also integrate with email to allow you to kind of do outreach.
It's not mass, it's not like a bulk send or anything like that.
It's not mailchimp.
But to send one by one custom templates and things like that, it does significantly save time.
If you're doing influencer marketing in scale.
Now, honestly, I always recommend that if somebody is new to influencer marketing and wants to give it a try, I suggest trying out Google, going there and running some keyword searches, seeing who you find, do the manual work to find the contact information, the first name, things like that, and send them them a template and see how things go before investing in a software.
Because you know the software is not just going to kind of do it for you.
You need to have the experience and the intuition to kind of know how to, how to really work it.
But like I said, you know, for us where we do influencer marketing at scale, you know, it's really, for us, it's really a necessity.
Omer (41:17.940)
Awesome.
Dave, thank you for taking the time to share your expertise with our audience.
I certainly learned a lot from this conversation and I'll definitely start putting some of these things into practice myself.
Now, if folks want to find out more about NINJA Outreach, they can go to ninja outreach.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Dave (41:41.990)
Just shoot me an email.
David Calm.
I almost can guarantee to respond in 24 hours.
Even if you just want to say, hey, I really like the podcast that you guys were on.
And that's it.
I'll say hey back.
Omer (41:54.320)
Awesome, Dave, thanks again, and I wish you continued success.
And at some point, let's get you back and talk about, you know, telling the story of ninja outreach and, you know, how what you guys have done with that.
So maybe we can do that sometime in the future.
Dave (42:11.840)
Yeah, I would love to.
Thank you for having me.
Omer (42:13.600)
Great.
Thanks.
Take care.
