 It's really bright up here. I think the only thing brighter is probably Rand's shoes right now. That's the first bad joke. It's not going to get any better, right? Thing that's kind of amazed me so far today has been the transcriptions that have been happening, like live. It's incredible. I think we should all give Stacey behind stage a massive round of applause, right? All right, save some of it for me. Save some of it. Is it weird typing to ask people to give you a round of applause? I don't know if I'm allowed to break the 4-4. APPLAUSE Cool. Well, that's about all the clapping that I'm going to get from now on. OK. How many have you seen case stays like this? Bunch of tactics. Go and grow from 0 to X. Grow by 963%. 11,000%. 482%. And you're like, yeah, I'm going to do all these different tactics and we're going to make like a million bucks. I don't have anything against these. I've written some of these, right? But the thing to remember here is that having just like a bag of tricks that you can use is good. But if you don't understand the why behind the what, you're never going to be able to actually truly solve problems and adapt when things happen outside of what you're expecting. So let me just give a quick example of this. Let's take the example of link building. Hands up in here if anyone's been involved in any way, shape or form of the soul-destroying tasks of link building. Yeah, it's really good fun. Pretty much every day I see like another article come out and it's like, Google kill guest posting. Guest posting's dead. Shit, what are we going to do? Right, let me just clear up something around guest posting to answer the question directly of is guest posting dead? Who gives a shit, right? It does not matter. It does not matter to you at all, right? The reality is like Google didn't kill guest posting. We did. This is why as marketers we're not allowed nice things, right, because we get something and it works and then we're like, perfect, put it into the machine and do it a million times. And we ruin it for everybody. It's fine. I do it as well. I'm a big ruiner. But the thing here is like there are lots of different ways to go about building links. There's like a bunch of different tactics, right? Link building is all about being able to put enough resources into something where you make a net gain from the thing that you're doing. As soon as that net gain diminishes, it's not worth doing. Every one of these tactics on here eventually will not be worth anything. They won't work at all for you. At least the economics of it won't work out, right? But what they all solve to do is solve a specific problem. And that problem that they're solving is being able to drive authority back to your website. A really great example of this was if anyone follows Glen Allstop, Viper Chill's blog, he put together this graph. And it looks at Seth Godin's most linked to blog posts by the number of links it's achieved year by year. Seth Godin's blog is like the pillar of consistency. I think the average word count is like three words. And it gets shared like a million times. I'm really jealous. But if you look, like, Cess's audience has been growing and growing and growing year on year. You would think the amount of links that his articles get from just earning links gets higher and higher and higher. But they haven't, right? The main reason behind this is because back in, say, 2008, 2007, you would write a great article and someone would say, wow, that's an amazing article. I'm going to reward this by adding a link on my blog. I'm going to write about it. Now people are like, no, fuck it. Just put it on Facebook or Twitter. That's good enough. People are not going to go to the level and extent of linking to you that easily now. And this is out of Cess's control. And this brings me on to the point, right? It's like you want to treat every single tactic, strategy, channel that you have as if it completely doesn't work tomorrow. It's a pretty stressful thing to think about. I know. I'm not trying to induce stress here. But it's the only way that you can truly stay ahead of what you're doing. And this all comes down and starts with channel prioritization. We're really big on this at HubSpot, spend a lot of time prioritizing and mapping out the different channels, activities that we're going to be working on, so that we can safeguard ourselves against the risk of these channels suffering fatigue. This is a matrix that was put together by Brian Balfour, a former VP of growth at HubSpot. Now see a reforge, awesome guy as a link to this. This is actually something that my team uses in HubSpot. And we map out each of our perfect channels. And then we stack rank based on a number of different criteria, right? So what's the cost of getting involved in this channel? What's the depth of targeting? How many resources do it acquire? What's the scale and reach and size? There's a bunch of these different frameworks. If anyone uses growth hackers, they use the ICE framework. The idea here is prioritizing stack ranking on importance. Then we'll go a layer deeper, right? We'll say, OK, within SEO, this is like a few of our experiments that we're about to run and try and scale up. And what we tried to do with the experiments that we run is ideally dedicate time to things that can specifically be replicated and done again and again and again so that we can get scale with a list. So I'm going to take you on a bit of a journey now. And I'm going to use the medium of over convoluted acronyms to take you from the start of this journey, which is realizing there's a problem. Sondog rolls off the tongue. To the end point, Sondog. Again, really catchy. You're probably thinking, Matt, did you just make up these acronyms to try and sound intelligent? Are they IKEA products, maybe? OK, that's not an IKEA product. Nothing costs $7,000 in IKEA, right? Basically, the starting point is here. You have that moment, and you're like, shit. Numbers look really bad, right? And what you want to get to is here. Shit, our numbers look great. Get some of that sweet Sondog. There's a number of things that happen along this way. So we start out with the channel evaluation, proposal solution, experimentation, and eventually take our big bag of monies back to the office. To do this, what I'm going to do is take you inside my brain to help you think about how I approach solving complex problems and how other great companies are thinking about solving great problems as well. So let's start this out with some problems. Problem number one, and this is something that every single person in the entire room is going to face at some point in another. And it's the fact that every single channel you operate will at some point suffer fatigue. This could be you're doing really well in organic search. Everything's going great. And then you hit a demand ceiling. People aren't searching as much anymore, and you can't force people to search more for things. Or your acquisition costs for paid search have started to skyrocket through increased competition. And now your acquisition costs outweigh the lifetime value of your customer, and you're not making profit. Email deliverability starts to channel down, or Gmail starts pushing emails into the Promotions tab. And all of a sudden, your email open rates go down. All these things force you to suffer fatigue. Most companies, most of us here, the large majority of our acquisition channels and all of the stuff that comes into our funnel, come through maybe one, two maximum channels. Show a hand here. Who has organic search as their main driver of traffic to their website and their business, right? Yeah, same. What happens if tomorrow, organic search in your business, tanked, and all of a sudden it brought in nothing? If any of you remember this story, I'm probably reliving a few nightmares for people, the florist, online florist company, Interflora, received a very famous Google search penalty heartbreakingly just before Valentine's Day. The biggest sales time of the year, right? Tanked, organic traffic, gone. That is a really, really tough challenge to have to face. Do you know what's even tougher? What if there wasn't even search demand for what you have to offer to begin with, right? People aren't even searching for what you have. So I want to tell a little story here of a company called Zappia. Anybody in the room know Zappia, use Zappia, right? Right, great, a few woos. Anyone from Zappia here? Yeah, commission check in the post, please. Right, perfect. So when you try and it's like, lots of people love Zappia. I love Zappia. I try and explain what Zappia is, and I'm kind of like, it's like an app marketplace to connect different apps together to increase their functionality. I was thinking about this. I was like, OK, I'm going to do a bit of research here. How many people are searching for an app marketplace to connect different apps together to increase their functionality? Google Trends didn't actually have a lot. I thought there would be big demands. I was ready to spin up an affiliate site, right? Like, there wasn't a whole lot. That's tough. So a lot of people in that situation, they're like, well, you know, people who aren't really searching for what we have to offer, SEO probably isn't for us. Zappia didn't do that. Zappia, instead of following just a bunch of tactics, they said, OK, we've got to solve this problem. And to do that, we're going to create side doors into our website. Instead of people who know how to walk through the front door of our business and find us because they know what they're looking for, we need to enter them in at a point where they show some layer of intent to eventually capture them. So here's something really interesting that they did. So if you think about why would you use Zappia, right? Primarily, it's to extend a product's functionality. There's three, maybe more, different stages that you're at when you're looking to do this. So one might be an integration. So an example could be, OK, I'm using HubSpot CRM, but I want to hook up to MailChimp, right? They have pages for each of these. Specific features. So, OK, I want to plug an RSS feed into Twitter so it auto-tweets out. And then they have product comparison. If you're looking to improve the functionality of the product, you're probably comparing two different things. So they built out review pages for every single one of their brands. So here's the product integration page. For every single integration that they have on Zappia, which is a lot of them, they have an individual page for them. And what these pages also have is, like this example, a similar taxonomy in the URL. So you have HubSpot CRM slash MailChimp. And lo and behold, when you Google HubSpot CRM and MailChimp, they rank number one, the first side door they enter, right? And it's not just that that they get. So you've got things like they rank for stripe integrations, Trello integrations, pipe drive integrations, Insightly integrations, loads and loads of these. An amazing way to funnel users in through a side door. The specific features, right? You've got things like publish RSS feed to Twitter. Again, they created pages for every single individual function that can be done on these. Another side door into the business. And the third one, which is actually one of my favorite ones, is they have a review where they pull in review information of the product, information around all of the different reviews that it has. And then, lo and behold, they rank for, in this example, MailJet review. And they'll bring people into the product. It's perfect. The beauty here is, and you can see, like, Wishpond review, Office 365 review, I think at one point they rank for Google Drive. That is ridiculous. And they bring through hundreds of thousands of visitors off the back of this. And the beauty of all of this is every time they work with an integration partner, they'll do, like, a co-marketing campaign with them. And the integration partner will probably send a bunch of links into their site. And this is the next piece. Their internal linking is amazing. For all of these pages, right, you've got breadcrumb links that link back to the individual brand pages, distributing the authority internally to the pages they want to rank most. Every single individual recommended zap links through to an individual feature page. You've got the bottom here about MailChimp, about HubSpotCRM. You click in, and you go to the review pages. So all of the external authority that they're bringing in pushes through, and they redirect it through to the different areas of the site they want to rank. And they end up with some of that sweet-ass Sonog, right? That is impressive. So what if your problem is people are searching for you and you're not visible? Pretty common one. You just don't rank. So good SEOs are not people that are just great at building links. They're not just people that can make great content that performs really well. It's not even necessarily about just someone that knows how to rank a web page. It's about understanding the right lever to pull at the right time. And that requires a fundamental understanding of the situation and the problem that you face. Do I need to push more authority? Is it a discoverability issue? Do we need to build more relevance, more content? And this all comes back to the three most fundamentally basic ways and stages that a search engine works, crawling, indexing, ranking. Knowing whether you've got a problem on the crawlability side or the indexing side and the ranking side is pretty much what's going to save you wasting countless days, weeks, money on trying to solve a problem that isn't the right one. So this is for a brand new website how a lot of people start out. They're like, OK, brand new website. SEO time. We're going to rank and bank. Let's go push out two blog posts a week. It's going to work. Right, a month goes by. Right, time to ramp things up. Four blog posts a week. Let's do it. Six blog posts per week. And you're ramping up and up and up and up. And you're like, we're still here in some like Sondog, right? TM, it's not working. Why is this not working? They're pulling the wrong lever. I'm going to try and explain this in a better way. And the only way I know how is with Kanye West and Steak Burger Burger Witches. Right, so Kanye, here's a Steak Burger Burger Witch. Probably tastes a bit like a foot. Would you like it? Kanye says, no, I don't want a Steak Burger Burger Witch. It looks horrible. Like, bear with me. What if I told you you could have more Steak Burger Burger Witches? Right, you going to get in on that? He's like, no, I don't want a Steak Burger Burger Witch. I didn't want one. I don't want 10. This is what you're doing when you're solving a problem with another problem. If the current content you're creating isn't really performing, what makes you think doing twice of that will work better? When do you ever do that? You never go, let's spend $100K on paid this month. It didn't work. Ramp it up to $200K. You're not going to do that. This is about understanding the right lever to pull, building authority at the time when you need to build authority, and then pushing the lever of relevancy. Quick example of something like this. I was doing a little bit of consulting and worked on a small project with a team called App Institute a little while back. This was around the time of the Pokemon Go launch. And one thing that we needed to do was build up the authority of this site. Instead of just pushing out blog post after blog post after blog post, it's like we need to boost some authority here. So we built out this real-time dashboard from the time you get on the page, to count up how much revenue Pokemon Go app had generated. We did some PR campaign around it. And it was just the right timing for all of the release for this to kick off. We had a bunch of pickup in top tier trade publications like NextWeb, Android Authority, GamesRadar. And we had a bunch of sonal, right? 100K visits in seven days, all coming through with links from 308 different websites, a bunch of authority pushed into the site that we could then distribute through the architecture and then still site-wide boosts across the board. That's pulling the right lever at the right time. But what if you have the authority? This is like one of my favorite situations to be in, right? It's like, we have a bunch of authority right now, but we don't really rank. Why is that? And a lot of the time, people fall into the opposite trap here. They're like, oh man, maybe we need more links. Let's invest in tons of link building right now. And that's equally as bad as an expensive and offers a similar offering to Kanye West. Has anyone heard of Panda Dock? Document signing company, pretty cool. They integrate with HubSpot, really cool team. And they have a bunch of authority, right? They've got a ton of links to their website. They've built a VC-funded company. They continually get like big pressure releases. One of the challenges that they found is like, we have tons of authority, but the things that people search for that are directly related to our product, walking through the front door, right? Signed documents online. They don't get a whole lot of volume. So they play the side door approach. How do we harness all the authority that's locked up in this website, reroute it into something that can help us rank? And they did something pretty genius, I think. So what's the first thing you're gonna do before you need to get a document signed? You're probably gonna create a document. So like, well, that makes sense. Let's go after document templates. They built out a huge library of tons of different business document templates. It's like creating proposals, RFPs. There was like pitch decks in there. Tons of great stuff. Even like social media marketing proposals, chasing the long tail. And to make that even better, they weren't just gated with a form, right? This actually went directly into their product. You could edit them, add your own logo, and then when you finished all of this, all you needed to do was go and sign up. They created really strong internal linking architecture. And lo and behold, they've ranked for a bunch of these different terms, like proposal template, business proposal template, business plan, RFP template. It's like one of their biggest sources of acquisition of new users into their product. And it brings through like into the hundreds of thousands of visitors on a monthly basis. They were able to harness the existing authority and they pulled the right lever at the right time instead of just piling the same shit that wasn't working and forcing it into it. And that's because they understood the problem as opposed to just trying to play a tactic. Here is a secret that some people don't get at all. Sometimes you don't need to create net new content to get some gains. I mean, albeit I'm slightly hypocritical being from HubSpot saying this, right? I'll give you that one for free. We create a lot of great content. We create a ton of content, right? But sometimes we do things to get wins while we don't need to create content. Here's an example. So we have like 1,500, 2,000 eBooks. Some of you in this room have probably downloaded one of our eBooks, right? We're gonna email you forever, literally until you die. You'll never escape. Chokes on you guys. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to get a load of these landing pages ranking a lot better, right? So we built this marketing library. And the idea was, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go after and categorize all of these different eBooks that we have and try and rank for a bunch of terms like content marketing eBooks, SEO eBooks, social media webinars, et cetera, et cetera. And we built this whole thing. We were like, oh, this is awesome, right? When we finished giving ourselves a big pat on the back, we were like, okay, we better check the numbers. And we had some real sondog happen, right? There's nothing. Zero, what is going on? So we dug a little deeper, had a look at what Google was actually seeing when they were crawling this content. This tiny book icon, pretty compelling content. None of it could be crawled. The way that we'd built the marketing library was not the best and it'd been gated behind our product. And for a number of reasons, fucked everything up and we had nothing. So we were like, okay, well, I guess we just redesigned the exact same thing that we've already built. Instead of building it behind like a bunch of JavaScript and a load of other bloated code, we'll just simplify it down. And we rebuilt it. Super simple. Added a bit better internal linking and immediately added 600,000 new visitors to the website in the year. Pretty good result, right? That was really nice for us. And we didn't create any net new content. We just redesigned the existing thing that already was there. This is the thing I want everyone to take away here is like, all of this is about understanding a problem, right? You need to be able to understand the why behind the what. But there are a few other situations. What about when there isn't necessarily a problem but you're like, hey, there's this new awesome thing. We should definitely just go try it. We've all had those moments and you wanna explore a new opportunity. We talked about every channel suffering fatigue at some point, right? Now, being in the early adoption stage of a new channel is a way that you can reap huge, huge rewards. And you're basically adding a longer period of time before you hit that point of fatigue. You can also get in early to a new channel and build a moat around what you're doing, create much higher barriers of entry for everyone else that's gonna come in. So quick show of hands, who remembers the Mirka app? No, me neither, right? There's also risks in adopting new channels. Huge risks, right? The goal here is to land effectively in existing pools of users as is wonderfully demonstrated by this visual piece here. Let me give you a quick example. So here's Shopify's app store. Most people wouldn't say Shopify's app store is a channel, right? They're like, well, it's kind of like a retention play for Shopify, right? Well, wrong. Shopify's app store can be a massive channel. Friend of Mine runs a e-commerce app and they built an app for Shopify to bed deeper into Shopify's app store and maybe create some kind of acquisition. Every month, they pay zero to Shopify and they create 1,000 paying customers from the Shopify app store alone. That's almost 40K in MRR, from a landing page in the Shopify app store. There are tons of pools that you can dive into where there is existing potential customers and just trying to solve a problem as opposed to just listening to a few tactics of, okay, these are the channels that everyone's focusing on so we better just do that, right? There's a few others. Does anyone here use Alexa? I have like a borderline abusive relationship with Alexa. I would be very scared if someone read the transcripts. I'm really mean to her, but it's okay. Robots don't have rights yet, yet Alexa. The interesting thing about Alexa or outside of her pending lawsuit on me is in Q1 of 2016, there were 135 skills or like apps in the Alexa skill app store. Fast forward one year, there's over 10,000. That's huge growth. The even better thing about this is some of the top Alexa skills on the entire app store have like a total of like 13 or 20 reviews. You can't even have paid apps right now in the Alexa store. This has got to be for me one of the most untapped pools that is around at all today. The barriers to entry are super low and if anyone here is thinking about going and trying out something new and it's relevant, I would highly recommend looking at it. Chatbots as well. I'm not even gonna start going on about chatbots because I'm sure everyone's already sick to death of hearing about chatbots, right? I'm super into chatbots. We love it at HubSpot. We're doing a bunch of stuff. Dimash loves it, so we all love it. But they're taking off huge amounts, right? And that's another pool that people are diving into and getting great results. We've recently built a chatbot for HubSpot and just simply from the discover section of Facebook Messenger, we've been bringing in thousands of new users and not paying a single penny for it. It's been pretty incredible. So just bringing this full circle. The thing I'm gonna suggest everyone does today is imagine a world where everything you're doing right now doesn't work. Mitigate risk by exploring new opportunities but more importantly, be incredibly pessimistic about the problems that you face and have a plan for when they inevitably do become a lot more real, right? And everything will be fine and you'll be shopping around IKEA, have some sweet, Sonog. Thanks a lot everyone, it's been great. If you wanna get the deck, you can download it here.