AISEO for your Ecommerce Business | Farzad Rashidi

Farzad Rashidi

00:00:00.160 - 00:00:00.400

Foreign.

Matt Edmundson

00:00:05.360 - 00:02:40.470

Hello and welcome to the E Commerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. Now this is a show all about helping you deliver E commerce. Wow.

And to help us do just that, I'm chatting with today's guest all the way from Washington D.C. farzad Rashidi from Respona about strategies for AI search. Or let's put it another way, how do you get ChatGPT to recommend you and your products?

That's what we're going to be talking about in today's show, which I'm very excited about because we've talked a lot about AI. We have never talked about how to conquer AI search. So I have got my notebook, I have got my pen and I am ready to take a lot of notes.

So I hope you are as well.

Of course, if you are subscribed to a very friendly, well presented, highly formatted newsletter, then these notes will be coming straight to your inbox automatically. If you haven't yet signed up to the newsletter, you can do that@e commercepodcast.net just follow the links.

You'll figure it out, I'm sure if you're in E commerce and if you can't, maybe my UI is all kinds of crazy or maybe you shouldn't be in E commerce. Either way, you should probably get in touch. But a very warm welcome to you. If you are new to the show.

Love to know your thoughts, love to know your comments. You can reach out to me on social mediatmondson, either on Instagram or on LinkedIn in just drop me a line, let us know what you think.

Send me a link to your website. I would love, love, love to see it. And if you are regular to the show and you've been coming back, all power to you my friend. Thank you so much.

Like I said last time, it enables us to get some great guests on the show. The more people listen to it, the bigger the show gets, the bigger the guest gets. Like Faza. I mean you can't get much bigger, can you?

Just call it so we are going to get into all that. But like I say, big thank you to those of you who subscribe. Now let's talk about Fozza.

He is the lead innovator at Respona, a link building outreach platform designed to boost businesses organic traffic. From Google. Before Respona, he led marketing at Visme, driving the platform to over 27 million users. Yes, you heard that right.

27 million users and achieving 2.5 million monthly organic visitors. If only my website had such beautiful numbers. But farzad welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. How are we doing today, good, sir.

Farzad Rashidi

00:02:40.630 - 00:02:42.870

I'm doing very well. Thank you so much for having me.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:42.870 - 00:02:51.990

Matt, it's great that you're on here. Great that you're on here. 27 million users. I mean, that's just. That's a lot of people, right?

Farzad Rashidi

00:02:51.990 - 00:02:58.550

They're actually. They just passed 30. That number is a little outdated, but, yes, they're doing well. Right.

Matt Edmundson

00:02:58.550 - 00:03:02.990

Well, that's incredible. So tell me a little bit about Responder. What's going on there?

Farzad Rashidi

00:03:03.230 - 00:03:46.830

A hundred percent.

So Responder, in a nutshell, is a platform that connects you to other websites, companies that are writing content about topics that are similar to yours.

So, for example, if you run an E commerce brand and you want to promote your product a lot of ways, where customers will find a product like yours or Googling, and they're looking for products like X, Y and Z, best X, Y, and Z, tools for that and this.

And so essentially, responda helps you identify some of these opportunities that are getting a lot of traffic, puts you in touch and connects you with the website owner and helps to get more product placements. Get other websites to link back to your website, per se.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:47.150 - 00:03:54.110

Fantastic. And in fact, it's fair to say you are a user of your own medicine, because how we got connected was in fact through your platform.

Farzad Rashidi

00:03:55.620 - 00:04:10.020

That's right. Yes, absolutely. So one of our customers. Yes. So you found your podcast through Respond. Alex reached out.

And so since you guys were connected, he was so kind to put us in touch, and I'm glad that he did.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:10.500 - 00:04:16.740

Yeah. Yeah. So Alex was on the show a couple of months ago. Alex Beck from couch.com.

Farzad Rashidi

00:04:16.820 - 00:04:17.340

That'S right.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:17.340 - 00:04:27.720

And he's such a legend, that guy. I really like that guy. We had a fun time. If you've not heard the episode, then definitely check that out. You'll find it in the archive.

Farzad Rashidi

00:04:28.280 - 00:04:28.760

Amazing.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:28.760 - 00:04:29.760

But, yeah, amazing.

Farzad Rashidi

00:04:29.760 - 00:04:32.840

I didn't know it was released yet, so I'll definitely check it out.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:33.320 - 00:04:47.400

Well, that's a good point. I'm assuming it's been released. I definitely did the conversation a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks. Couple of months ago, Right.

No, I think it's been released because we've been joking back and forth about some of the video that's been released on LinkedIn.

Farzad Rashidi

00:04:47.400 - 00:04:49.910

Okay, great. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:50.150 - 00:05:14.230

So now we've been having a good time. So let's get into this then, because originally we had it down to talk about SEO, and you came up and you said, matt, listen, I've Got an idea.

What do you think about what? I opened up with AI Search and I thought this was utter genius. So let's just explain the, the, the reason why we're talking about it.

Explain to me why you thought this was a good idea.

Farzad Rashidi

00:05:14.390 - 00:07:06.120

100%. So we've, we onboard, obviously I'm still involved with our customer onboarding.

So every single customer comes on board, I have a conversation with them. And recently a lot of the conversations were centered around AI search.

And you know, it's a buzzword and people are like, everybody's talking about it. And I tend to personally be more skeptic towards these. I'm like, oh, it's a fad, you know.

But recently I've gotten into tennis and I was researching tennis rackets. So I noticed usually I would just pull up Google and just go and Google, hey, what are some of the best tennis rackets?

But then I caught myself, literally, I was on ChatGPT, we use it quite extensively, and I was like, hey. I was just explaining some backgrounds, like, hey, I'm a new beginner.

But like, I've been playing for a few weeks, I've been playing with this racket and now I'm looking to upgrade and I'm, and I'm looking for these qualities in the racket that has some power and like still control and so the stuff that is a little bit tough to communicate to Google in a way. And I was like, wow, hold on a second.

All of these rackets are E commerce brands and as a consumer, you know, that's looking to purchase, like somewhat of a significant purchase. I'm literally going on ChatGPT first, so. And I was like, wow. And this was literally a few days ago.

So I was like, this would be a perfect conversation to have with Matt because since it's so new and novel, most people won't have the slightest idea how to get their product to get recommended up there. And this is something that obviously is not as well talked about. A lot of people are just still trying to figure it out.

So I thought this would be a great conversation for us to have.

Matt Edmundson

00:07:07.010 - 00:08:22.540

And I think it is, because I'm laughing at, not at you. I'm remembering an event that happened just like on Monday. I think it was, I was sat in. In fact, it was Monday. Today is Thursday.

So three days ago I was sat in a. I was sat in a coffee shop, one of the local coffee shops. It was Monday morning.

I walked through the park, sat down, you know, got a cup of tea, and I took my Journal and was just thinking about a few things and one of the things that's been in the back of my mind recently was I wonder if I needed to drinking electrolytes, because I do. Like, I've got a. People might judge me. That's fine. I recently acquired a Peloton bike and so I use that three times a week. I didn't pay full price.

I just want to clarify. I used Facebook Marketplace and got a really good price. Anyway, I love the bike, I genuinely do. I think it's great. But I.

You, you obviously sweat lots. I'm like, do I need electrolytes? Because I can feel it during the day that I'm a little bit more tired. And so I'm like, I.

The reason I'm laughing is because I just sat there talking to. It wasn't chatgpt, it was Perplexity, which I absolutely love.

Farzad Rashidi

00:08:22.780 - 00:08:23.780

But I'm big fan.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:23.780 - 00:09:42.670

He is powered by Chat GPT. Right. So. And I, I just sat there and went, should I take these electrolytes? And it came back and basically said, well, let me ask you some questions.

We went back and forth and yes, you should. And now I understand it and you're having this little conversation and it was like, great. Or to be fair, I did have that conversation with ChatGPT.

Then I was in perplexity and said, what is the best electrolyte brand that I should get? And it came back with three options for me. And he said, I think you should get this, this, this and this.

And it's not until we've just been talking that I thought, where in the world did it get that information from? And what actually happened was I went and bought one of those. I bought the top brand AI recommended to me after asking me a bunch of questions.

Because you're right. I just, I look, I looked on Amazon, I looked on Google, I thought, I don't know what I'm getting. I don't know. Yeah, too many options.

And I just didn't understand it at all. And so I thought, this is absolutely fascinating. So I'm so happy. Why did I do that? Why did. Why did. Why did I go to AI? And.

And it's becoming easier, isn't it? Because now you can just. The Chat GPT app on your phone. I was having a conversation with it earlier. I didn't even have to type anything.

It was just asking me questions and I was answering and it was asking me more questions.

Farzad Rashidi

00:09:43.150 - 00:09:43.550

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:09:43.550 - 00:10:08.450

And it's just the most. In fact, I was asking it about intermittent fasting Should I intermittent fast if I'm not feeling great? And it's like, well, how do you feel?

And blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, maybe, maybe today you should eat a little bit earlier. And I was like, this is just the most extraordinary thing.

And so how do we do it then? Because you're right, more and more of us are starting to do this thing.

Farzad Rashidi

00:10:09.090 - 00:11:43.070

Yeah, 100%. So first it's important to understand the distinction between these AI models.

So OpenAI is a company, they're not a search engine, they're a technology company that builds these large language models, the LLMs. It's that detect the powers, essentially, language generation.

The reason why a lot of people still use tools like Perplexity is that they use the LLM to generate the answer, but based on essentially information that's already public on the web. So it makes the search results more reliable. So when you use Perplexity, you can understand, okay, where is that data coming from?

Like, who's actually recommending me to Intermittent fast. And the search tools are actually at the top. So essentially what it does, it kind of acts like a Google search.

So they actually have their own search engine that they built and it will go and just take a look at the first 10 results on Google essentially, and then dig through each one of the websites and it pulls bits and pieces from all of them and it understands overlapping.

So in this case, if you're asking, hey, what are some of the best electrolyte brands, the three that are recommended is most likely the one that's been more frequent and overlaps essentially in all those 10 search results that it went through. Now, ChatGPT is a little bit different. They have added the web search functionality because Microsoft owns half of it.

So they essentially are powered by Bing. What they're working on is a product similar to Perplexity. Oh my God, I cannot pronounce that word.

Matt Edmundson

00:11:44.430 - 00:11:45.790

How we say perplexity.

Farzad Rashidi

00:11:45.870 - 00:11:53.200

Exactly. Yes. I wonder if their founder can say Perplexity like five times, like X.

Matt Edmundson

00:11:56.400 - 00:11:58.320

You're on the show and find out. There's a chance.

Farzad Rashidi

00:11:58.640 - 00:14:42.540

Right. Anyways, so they're actually working on a new product, OpenAI, called SearchGPT, which is essentially similar to Perplexity.

So you can actually see the search result and the answers are cited. So you can go and actually explore more, which, you know, has been sort of incorporated into ChatGPT, but since you can't see it as visibly, they're.

They're working as separate product. So a lot of the search, all I'm trying And also Google itself. So they had their SGE search engine or excuse me, the search generative experience.

It's tough to catch up with all these terms. And so what we're doing essentially is like feature snippets on steroids.

So you know, you ask Google something, sometimes it has a little feature snippet.

So those AI generated ones were, were sort of pulled back a little and now I'm sure they're working on in the background because they get a lot of backlash since they're huge. So they can't, you know, they're not like a startup like Perplexity. If they give wrong information, it would be okay.

Yeah, people are going to go through them. So that's why it's, it's a little bit more difficult for them and slower for them as it is for larger companies in general.

But anyway, long story short, what I'm trying to say is that we are moving towards that direction just because the general experience of search is changing. You can give it more context, it understands you a lot better and gives you more concise answers that you don't have to dig through.

Like the 10 blue links on Google.

So all that to say as e commerce brands you need to start showing up on those search results and that this AI models generate regardless of where they are. And the question is, okay, where are they getting that information? And we want to be mentioned because they're not.

I mean chatgpt hallucinates a lot, but as I said with their new products, Search GPT and Perplexity, all these tools and Google's sge, they're all grounded in search results that's already public on the web. So they're essentially just summarizing the answers for you. So the question is how, how do you get yourself on those search results?

So it's no longer enough. So traditional SEO is essentially you getting your own web pages up in the search results as much as possible for your target keywords.

But now it's no longer that because it's what we're heading towards.

Again, it's majority still that experience, but within the next couple of years my assumption is that more and more people are going to start utilizing these chat bots and these chat interface. And so it's no longer enough to get your, your own website up in the search results.

Now you also have to be on other people's websites that are talking about topics that are related to yours in order to have enough frequency for it to pick up and be included in the answers.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:42.860 - 00:14:43.260

Right.

Farzad Rashidi

00:14:43.340 - 00:15:07.620

And that requires you to leave your cave and you know, people like to just sit behind a computer and type to actually go and start reaching out to other people, other websites, other websites that are ranking for your target keywords and incentivize them to work with you to place your products and talk about your products so that now you have a much higher chance of landing in one of the answers that they generate.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:08.660 - 00:15:15.740

This is interesting. So frequency then, I mean we used to call it backlinks, didn't we? In a lot of ways. Or guest content and all that sort of stuff.

Farzad Rashidi

00:15:15.740 - 00:15:16.100

Right.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:16.980 - 00:15:56.780

But frequency is becoming more and more important because this is how the, the AI finds information out.

It's, it's all based on frequency, not just the fact what was number one on Google but and actually one of the things I've also noticed with perplexity because I've got this pro mode thing, I don't know, you put it in pro and it, you putting your information and it writes four or five search terms.

So it searches for what you want but then it tries to figure out what you really want and it writes four or five search terms around what it thinks you really want and it goes and searches those as well.

Farzad Rashidi

00:15:57.260 - 00:15:57.740

Uh huh.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:58.220 - 00:16:25.500

And that I thought was really, really fascinating that, that actually I, I, I've not just got to get my website up, I've not just got a rank for terms which I think I need to rank for.

I've now got to think about frequency and I've also got to think about the search terms that AI is going to use around those search terms to try and make sure that I'm also ranking for those as well. Strikes me like there's a lot going on here.

Farzad Rashidi

00:16:27.780 - 00:17:14.490

Yeah. And that also adds a level of credibility.

So the nice thing about the reason why we rely on a lot of these AI engines is that it's a culmination of research that they've done, this model has done at the point of search.

It's not just an individual website's opinion obviously if five websites are mentioning one specific brand, it's much more likely that that's an actual good brand that you want to buy versus them just placing themselves at the top of the search results somehow. It could be an affiliate agreement, it could be, you know, a sponsored link a lot of the time.

So that sort of adds a level of credibility to the search results the more, the more different websites are talking about your brand and talking about your product.

Matt Edmundson

00:17:15.210 - 00:17:37.470

Yeah, that's really, really powerful.

I'm kind of curious, where do you, where do you start like if you're for example, if you're just starting out in E commerce, you kind of going, well I'm kind of new to this game. It sounds like a lot, dude, where do they start? You know, where's a good place to begin?

Farzad Rashidi

00:17:37.790 - 00:17:43.790

That's an excellent question. So I actually have some strategies that I'm happy to share. Step by step.

Matt Edmundson

00:17:43.870 - 00:17:48.190

That's a beautiful thing. That's what I was hoping you would say. So let's go through the strategies.

Farzad Rashidi

00:17:48.860 - 00:18:07.740

Absolutely. So first and foremost, one of the simplest strategies I always recommend is what I call the listicle strategy.

So think of it, just put yourself in shoes of a customer. So let's say Matt, when you wanted to buy electrolytes, what did you search on wherever the search engine was?

Matt Edmundson

00:18:08.380 - 00:18:15.900

I didn't actually search on the search engine. What did I write? I think I went to Amazon, I just put in electrolyte drinks.

Farzad Rashidi

00:18:16.950 - 00:18:25.350

Right. But when you are searching for it, as in like usually research terms like best electrolyte brands or something like that.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:25.670 - 00:18:30.310

Yeah, I would have put in something like best electrolyte brands.

Farzad Rashidi

00:18:30.790 - 00:18:31.190

Right.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:31.430 - 00:18:36.470

Or something like that. Certainly that's why I put into Perplexity. What's the best brand?

Farzad Rashidi

00:18:36.470 - 00:18:37.590

Yeah, exactly.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:37.590 - 00:18:38.950

For this, for this product.

Farzad Rashidi

00:18:39.190 - 00:18:39.550

Right.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:39.550 - 00:18:41.670

Most reputable. I think I might have said most.

Farzad Rashidi

00:18:41.670 - 00:19:43.450

Reputable, top best, you know, essentially different variations of that topic.

So anything that implies to the search engine that this is a list of I want to, I want to purchase, I want to evaluate a variety of brands, what are the ones that I should look into. So the first thing we do is I use this, what I call this Google Advanced. Well I don't call them, they're called Google Advanced operators.

So Google is very flexible when it comes to the search strings. You can type in order to find opportunities. And what I like to do is essentially just pull up Google and utilize these advanced operators.

One of them is called intitle. So essentially or you know, if you're just starting out, you're a novice, like you don't have to worry about that.

You can just type literally best electrolyte brands, best CBD gummies, best tennis rackets, whatever and then just go through the search results using this advanced operators you can get them a little bit more targeted so that they're more likely to be listicles than there are other things.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:43.530 - 00:19:43.930

Right.

Farzad Rashidi

00:19:44.330 - 00:20:00.330

But you know you'll be able to essentially go through the search results and then find non competing articles. So some of them may be your competitors, like a lot of electrolyte brands themselves.

Have an article on best electrolyte brands and surprise, their brand happens to be.

Matt Edmundson

00:20:00.330 - 00:20:01.570

Oh, they're always going to be number one.

Farzad Rashidi

00:20:01.570 - 00:23:32.710

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Right.

So there are some of those, but there are some independent publications, lots of them, I would say the argument, majority of them that are, they're not electrolyte brands, but they're writing content about that. So it could be a news channel, it could be a blog, it could be a health website. So now collecting those first.

So essentially finding, okay, what specific article from what website is step one. Now step two is who's the right person to contact for that website.

So a lot of people just intuitively will go and find a contact Us page or something on the website and then reach out to that, and again, surprise, not gonna get much of a reply. I mean, unless it's a very small blog, that's the only email they have. Like if someone reaches out to your support channel or support email.

Hello, unless it's a sales query, then you're probably not gonna pay much attention to it. So usually the research starts on LinkedIn, so instead of the website itself.

So once you find the website, we usually find either their LinkedIn link or I Google the website's domain and site LinkedIn.com yeah, and then you can easily spot their LinkedIn page and go through the employees.

And I usually try to see if we can find like a content manager, editorial person or some, some person in their partnerships or marketing or somewhere relevant. And sometimes they don't have anyone like that. If it's a smaller publication, maybe just the owner or the founder and.

And usually at last reserve, if you couldn't find a LinkedIn page that don't have any sort of presence there, then rely on the generic image email. So there's that tiered system of finding the right person.

A lot of the times, if you can find the author of the article and check and see if that person works at the company, that also would be a great contact. So a lot of times they're not actual staff writers. There might be contributors or freelancers.

So you wouldn't want to reach out to those because they won't have any sort of editorial access to the publication. So finding someone actually works there. So if it's the writer of the article and that person works there, that'd be the best person.

If not, okay, let's go to the content manager. So then once you have that person's LinkedIn found that you want to find their email address. And so we actually have a free tool.

You can Google like respond to email finder and it's like a ungated thing that you can put in anybody's name and domain. It will help you find the email address. There's a bunch of tools out there that help you do that once you have identified the right person.

And then there you go. So that's your person. Now the question is the pitch, right? And so how do you actually get.

So now we, we've identified a block was our webpage that we really want to mention on we found the right person, got their email. So now the question is how do we, what do we say to them? Whatever you do, do not go on ChatGPT and say what do I say to this person?

Please, please don't. Not at least at the current stage of these LLMs. So they're just going to write a very wordy email.

Even if you give it like some instructions, it still wouldn't sound natural. Write that email yourself, at least the template, the basic template of it yourself. And there's a few things you want to hit in that email.

Just general rules of thumb that I'm sure Matt, you get a, you, you get your fair share of bad cold emails since you have a popular podcast. So hopefully these will resonate. So first thing, don't make it too long. Keep it super short and sweet.

So we see a significant drop in reply rates once we exceed a hundred words. So 780 words max, that's literally like three or four sentences.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:32.950 - 00:23:33.510

Yeah.

Farzad Rashidi

00:23:33.830 - 00:25:09.050

So keep it short and sweet. The goal of the first email is not to get your product place is not to build a partnership. Goal of the first email is to get them to reply.

And if you're sending a long list of emails with a long email with a list of, you know, five benefits to your product, nobody's going to read that even so keep it short and sweet. Two is personalization.

So you want to imply to that person that hey, you've done some research and usually mention something interesting we have talked about in the article would give that first line, would give that indication that hey, this is at least a halfway decent email. Even if it's nowadays with these AI tools it's easier to generate those but it's still and it's an indication.

Nine, it still puts at that top 1% of people, 99% of people don't, don't bother changing their templates.

So customization is second and three is incentive which in my opinion is actually most important of all but goes without saying that people aren't just doing Things out of the goodness of the heart in business most of the time. Right. Not. There are exceptions, of course, but put yourself in shoes of the recipient.

You'd be surprised how many people I onboard into responda and then I take a look at their template. I'm like, would you reply to an email that you're sending to other people? And they're like, no, absolutely not.

I'm like, then why are you sending it to other people? So you can't just reach out to someone and say, hey, can you pick up my grandmother from the airport? No, nobody's going to just do something for it.

This is not how the world works.

Matt Edmundson

00:25:09.770 - 00:25:28.470

It's funny how we know that intuitively, but we just seem to take our brain of the box and just go, well, this will be fine. Surely that'll work. Yeah.

It's always intrigued me because you've gone to all the effort up until this point, but you just, it's at this point everything sort of, sort of fails.

Farzad Rashidi

00:25:29.990 - 00:25:34.630

Exactly. Yeah. It's a puzzle and if you mess up either one of them, it's just not going to work.

Matt Edmundson

00:25:34.870 - 00:25:35.350

Yeah.

Farzad Rashidi

00:25:35.350 - 00:25:50.920

So, so, and I think it's because of the abstraction technology. You're not actually looking at a person, you're just looking at a computer screen typing something.

So you don't really understand the fact that it's actually going to go to a human who's going to sitting there with their pyjamas.

Matt Edmundson

00:25:51.000 - 00:25:52.360

That's very true. Yeah.

Farzad Rashidi

00:25:52.840 - 00:28:27.600

So we got to hit those three things. What's the incentive? What's in it for them? It's got to be short and sweet and it's going to be customizable.

Like customize that person personalized email. Now you might be saying, hey, that's a lot of work and that's what we have. We built a tool around that.

But again, it's not to say that we're doing any magic. Everything you can do manually yourself. And so once we have an email crafted, send it and last but not least, follow up.

So about a month, about a week in. So give a few days to a person and if you're sending it manually, just snooze and follow up once.

And make sure in that follow up email you're saying that it's a one time follow up. Right. So do not pester people. Right. That's aren't interested.

If you send two emails to someone that haven't replied to, you're more likely not interested. You might get some advice other than that, but it's going to Ruin your email domain reputation.

Because if you make people angry, they don't like your emails, they're going to mark it as spam. It's going to harm your domain reputation. So don't do that. Be nice to people. Just hey, it's a one time follow up.

If I don't hear back, just assume you're not interested to remain respectful. Yes, that's it. We have done it. That's one strategy. Listicles and now rinse and repeat, which are keywords you could come up with.

And I guarantee you, if you've played this right, means it's a strong enough incentive. So what's a strong enough incentive that we should elaborate on that? Just a few examples.

So if you have a decent product that everybody can use, sending them free samples is good. People love free stuff. If you have an affiliate program, that's a great one. So if they have a listicle, they would love some monetization.

If they generate some sales so you can do some revenue share with them. So if you use ShareAsale or something like that, CJ Network, whatever, that would be a great way to also add them in.

Third one would be obviously monetary compensation. That's my least favorite because usually legitimate publications, stuff like that aren't interested and monetary comp.

Yeah, but there are sometimes some editorial fees, stuff like that. If it's a legitimate publication, it gets a lot of traffic. That might be something you may want to consider. These are just examples.

As I said, there's different ways to skin a cat. So there are different motivations, work in different niches depending on the industry you're in. But yeah, so that's the listicle strategy.

That's a simple one, that's very intuitive. Hopefully that covers it. I have a few more, but I'm going to pause here real quick, Matt, give you a chance to.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:27.600 - 00:29:06.640

Yeah, no, it's really great. I, I like the simplicity of it. So I like the listicles. I get that. I get that. I can figure out who wrote the article.

I figure I can figure out who contacted them. I can do the legwork. I can go to LinkedIn, I can, you know, figure out who it was, get their email address and so on and so forth.

I can then reach out to them.

I, I'm going to make an assumption here fazad and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that what you guys do at Respona can do most of that legwork for me, which is how you've sort of come to where you are on the software, would that be correct?

Farzad Rashidi

00:29:06.720 - 00:29:33.900

Yeah, absolutely. So the background is that vismu, we were doing all these manually, even though it's a software product, still a product.

So we want to get on all the best presentation software, best design tools, yada, yada, yada. So you still had to do all that manually. So we built an internal tool to help us sort of streamline that flow.

So you can feed it with a keyword and it will do all the work for you. So we developed as a standalone product and released it as a standalone product. So that's kind of the backstory of how respondent came to be.

Matt Edmundson

00:29:34.140 - 00:29:38.060

Fantastic. But obviously you don't. You can do this manually. You can go figure it all out.

Farzad Rashidi

00:29:38.380 - 00:29:38.940

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:29:39.820 - 00:30:42.510

Let's talk about this pitch a little bit more. So just because I can hear all the questions people are asking, because the questions, some questions are in my head, I think.

So we're looking for something that's 100 words or less, so something about 70, 80 words in length. And I'm going to go, hey, Farzad, just want to say that was an awesome article, man. On the 10 best tennis rackets to buy.

If you're a beginner, I think that'll really help whoever. I'd love to send you our racket, which is also great for beginners. Would love to get your feedback on it. Can I do that? Love and hugs, Matt.

Maybe not love and hugs, but you know what I mean, it's as simple as that. Right? Is what you're saying is the actual email, I'm sending that out, I've not heard from you. A week later, I'm going, hey, just check in.

This is just a one time follow up from me. Just check in on this. If it's of interest, I'd love to hear from you. If it's not, don't panic.

I'm not going to screw up your inbox by Matt kind of thing. And that's in essence what you're saying, right?

Farzad Rashidi

00:30:42.830 - 00:32:06.450

Exactly. And a lot of commerce owners already are doing this, but they only do it within the context of social influencers for some reason.

So they're doing this to Instagram people and TikTok influencers. And in my opinion, it doesn't make much sense. It's not to say social influencers don't work. They actually work very well for E commerce.

But if you get a TikTok influencer to post something once, yes, you're gonna get some sales and then two days later it's gonna go down to zero because you know They've produced new content, there's new things getting published all the time. So it's a constant rat race of you paying for influencers and then their influence dies. That post dies within I would argue 20 minutes.

But when you get a reputable website that's already getting ranking in traffic, you get your product there, it's there forever. I mean not forever, but you get the idea now this not only gets, sends referral traffic to your site, now these AI tools are going to pick them up.

And so the ROI on that is insane.

Even if you have to pay for that placement, I would argue that's a lot, lot more valuable, not a little bit more, a lot more valuable in the long run compared to social influencers.

So I, I would at least dedicate, you know, a portion of those influencer marketing budget to work and put it towards these because these to me make a lot more sense in terms of distribution. That's evergreen.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:06.770 - 00:32:39.780

That's really fascinating. I'm curious also what you've discovered about the one time follow up.

Now the reason I'm asking this is we have a couple of sequences which we send out to on colder outreach for some of the companies that we have and we have three, three email sequence. The number one is the hello, the number two is just checking in and the number three is this is the last time I'm going to be in touch.

You know the hello and goodbye email, we do that in a three email sequence.

Farzad Rashidi

00:32:40.020 - 00:32:40.580

Okay.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:40.980 - 00:32:43.700

What you're suggesting is actually to bring that down to two.

Farzad Rashidi

00:32:45.100 - 00:33:35.830

What I'm suggesting is to experiment with it. It's not. And science is more of an art at that point. One, two follow up is okay. If you go in three follow ups, four emails total, that's too much.

Cut that. So one or two follow ups, two follow ups is the absolute maximum. Wouldn't go any more than what you're doing.

I personally like it when people are respectful and just saying hey, it's a one time follow up. Yeah, but again, is that going to make that much of a difference?

No, it's probably not going to make any dent in your reply rates and open rates overall. But the long run, I think after years of doing cold outreach, it does reduce the likelihood intuitively.

Again, this is something I don't have concrete data on. It's my intuition that less people mark your emails as spam, so it will help maintain your domain repetition higher.

But two follow ups, you're doing okay.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:35.990 - 00:33:36.470

Yeah.

Farzad Rashidi

00:33:36.790 - 00:33:37.750

Just don't send five.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:37.750 - 00:33:58.210

Yeah, no, no, no, not at all. But I. We kind of kept it at 3. It just sort of felt right. What I've not done, ironically, given the podcast that I have, is we've never tested two.

And so I like the idea of testing it. And I think we will try your strategy and if might make it worse.

Farzad Rashidi

00:33:58.450 - 00:33:59.730

You know, and then you go back.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:00.210 - 00:34:09.090

Yeah, but we'll find out, won't we? We'll find out from there if it makes it better. I owe you a pint, brother.

So next time you're over here, I'll take you to the pub and I'll pay my debt.

Farzad Rashidi

00:34:09.330 - 00:34:10.270

Sounds like a plan.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:12.340 - 00:34:17.100

Absolutely. So what's another strategy? I mean, that's one is the listicle.

Farzad Rashidi

00:34:17.100 - 00:34:17.460

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:34:18.420 - 00:34:20.180

What's your second best strategy?

Farzad Rashidi

00:34:20.420 - 00:37:03.580

Yeah, so another one I like to do is product review. So. And it's. And it's a little bit different. So instead of you going after direct competitors, any tool that's in your space.

So for example, we just literally brought on a customer that's in sporting equipment. And I think they sell like pickleball equipment, stuff like that. Well, reach out to ones that are reviewing tennis rackets.

Like, yes, it's a different sport, but a type of website that's writing a reviews, certain type of. That's probably not the best example. Let's say you run, you have a health product.

Let's say you sell CBD gummies to help you help your customers get more. Get better, sleep. All right, well, there are only so many CBD gummies that you can find reviews on. So you would look up like X, Y and Z.

I don't take CBD gummies. I don't know any good brands. But one idea. All right, well, one idea you could do. So like AG1, that's like very popular now.

It's like a powder supplement. Again, I don't take it either, but it's like some sort of health drink. Yeah. Now it's within the same space.

So if, if a website is writing a review on AG1, they are most likely would be interested in your CBD gummies too, because that's within the realm of what you do. You know, AG1 has nothing to do with your product. Right. So we sell CBD gummies. There are powder that. That does different things.

So I would like you to sort of keep an open mind and you should never run out of opportunities that way. So now you take a popular brand or take a popular product and look up. So as I said, I sell CBD gummies, I go on Google and I look up AG1. Reviews.

And yes, there are some review sites, whatever and then there's actual websites, blogs that are people that are writing reviews on. And a lot of those also have a YouTube channel and they have other ways of distributing their content.

But it's a great way to also find opportunities for you to get people that are interested in writing reviews and then essentially getting them incentivizing them to write a review for yours. And that's another I would say channel that you can find opportunities for you to do outreach. Another one is competitor mentions.

So stuff that's not directly product reviews but if just mentioned AG1 in passing like hey, like the title article is how to get better sleep at night.

Or and then one of the paragraphs is written oh, you should, you know, take some supplements, maybe you're lacking iron or whatever and then take AG1. I'm completely butchering this because I'm not familiar with these products. But you get the idea you get.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:03.580 - 00:37:12.500

To get AG1 reaching out to you going can we just send you some so you understand what it is you're talking about? Which is fine. They should send me some as well. Yeah, actually no they shouldn't because I.

Farzad Rashidi

00:37:12.500 - 00:37:14.700

Take other is available publicly.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:14.700 - 00:37:18.690

So find me on LinkedIn. I'll send you the details is not from there.

Farzad Rashidi

00:37:18.690 - 00:39:29.190

That sounds great. But anyhow, yeah, so basically the ton of the articles that you find don't necessarily have to be a listicle or a review. It could just be a mention.

And so the way you find them is a little bit more difficult because if you just type ag1 there's a lot of essentially websites or a lot of articles on AG1 website that will show up. So you want to filter those. So for that we actually have a.

We use this Google advanced operators that sort of respond and builds automatically but you can build them yourself. And that is using basically saying. So I'm trying to see if folks that are listening how they're going to visualize this.

So there's this advanced operator called intext like inte XD and then you can type in ag1. So in their text dimension ag1. But within their text I also mentioned another keyword because sometimes the name of a company could be like purple.

What is purple? They know that's going to bring up the color purple and it's going to bring up the mattress.

So yeah, then we'd look up like for example health supplement. So intex ag1 intex health supplement or whatever. And then minus ag1.com or whatever the website is.

So it's a negative website and you know, and then you can decide if you want in URL Bl. So we'll essentially just help you find blog posts.

So what that will do is that will help you find blog posts that have been written that mention AG1 in their content within the context of health supplement that are not from ag1.com right. So that will just help you by filtered out by bulk. In bulk. So Google essentially does it work for you?

So now all of the search results now are going to be AG1 related products or excuse me, Agent 1 related content pieces. You could reach out to those site owners and then incentivize them and then we can get more and more into the weeds and going into more advanced.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:29.190 - 00:40:05.110

And like you say, you just keep going and going and going, don't you? Then once you enter the rabbit hole you can just keep going down there for as long as it. It goes on for. But that's super clever.

I like because you're, you're using some very simple instructions in Google search, aren't you? Text and yeah, it's pulling up the results. You're going through those you're connecting with.

You're doing it just got old fashioned legwork, aren't you? Connecting with people who are already writing this kind of stuff and going hey, can I same thing, incentive. Can we maybe connect over this?

Farzad Rashidi

00:40:05.590 - 00:40:06.230

Exactly.

Matt Edmundson

00:40:07.350 - 00:40:28.700

I mean if you were, if you.

I guess my question here for is that if you were a startup and if you were also an established E comm business because the budgets are very different, aren't they for these two companies, how much time would you be devoting to this?

Farzad Rashidi

00:40:30.060 - 00:42:05.310

That's an excellent question. So there is not an absolute numerical number that I could share. What I would share is in terms of resource delegation.

So how much of your resources you should be spending? And that's usually a function of content creation. So I like to follow the 8020 rule there.

So if you're spending essentially you should be spending 20% of your resources on content creation. 80% of promotion to get optimal results. That's usually people do it backwards. They spend 80% creating content and then 20% promoting it.

And so if you flip that ratio and again it's not to say you need to have more resources to promote no, produce less frequent content and then use the excess resources you have to spend more on promotion.

So if you're writing blog articles, write less blog articles and have the person that's writing the content pieces to actually go promote your product. And it's not just Product placements. Also for individual blog posts that we write, we try to get links to them and get folks to mention it.

Similar process. And so that is something that I think a lot of people sort of mistake is that, oh, I'm a one person show and I don't have a whole lot of time.

Well, brother, if you have one or two of those sites, say yes, that's going to bring an evergreen flow of customers to your e commerce store. Now it's painful, it's uncomfortable, people don't want to do it. Yeah, that's your competitive advantage.

If it was easy, then it would have been a channel in the first place. Right. So the fact is difficult is good.

Matt Edmundson

00:42:05.860 - 00:44:08.640

Yeah. So no, I totally agree. Yeah, totally agree.

I think I remember when I saw the power of this when I owned a beauty company and we were checking, this is going back, you know, a decade at least. I remember we looked at the analytics and we looked at the data and we were making £6,000 profit every single month because of one blogger in Sweden.

I mean Sweden's not a massive country. And this lady just wrote this article was really sweet and it generated six grand. In fact, no, it generated way more than £6,000.

Because I said, we contacted her and said, would you like to do some kind of an affiliate link? And she said, oh no, it's fine. And I'm like, but you would. She would in fact have earned six grand a month off the affiliate scheme.

That's how much it was bringing in. And it all of these links just to get them in. And you only need a few of those and you quids in really.

But I really like this because it's such an opposite message to what we hear with AI. With AI you can create a thousand articles this week. You know, I can take your long form video and give you 50 short form videos in a second.

But I love what you're saying, actually create less content, create really good content and then focus on promoting that content. It's, it's a wonderful message because so, so much of our time we create content but nobody reads it. It's like if we build it, they will come.

It's not quite what. It's not the Field of Dreams anymore, is it? It's not working that way anymore, unfortunately. Yeah, so no, love that. Love that.

Faiza, let me ask you a question. This is the time of the show where I say to you, what's your question? For me, this is where I ask you for a question.

I will take your question and I will answer it on social media and then I will spend a lot of time promoting said answer.

Farzad Rashidi

00:44:12.080 - 00:44:13.280

Sounds great. Brilliant.

Matt Edmundson

00:44:13.520 - 00:44:14.800

Okay, what's your question?

Farzad Rashidi

00:44:15.200 - 00:44:31.510

All right, well I think then the topic that we discussed today, I think a good question would be how can E commerce stores. Let me reword that and say it more coherently so you can actually utilize this clip.

Matt Edmundson

00:44:31.749 - 00:44:32.110

Sure.

Farzad Rashidi

00:44:32.110 - 00:44:44.830

How can E commerce stores tweak and adjust and adapt their strategy in the age of AI? Very good. To customer promotion or customer acquisition.

Matt Edmundson

00:44:46.910 - 00:45:13.410

Okay, if you want to know how I'm going to answer that question, come follow me on social media Matt Edmondson on Instagram and just look for me on LinkedIn. It's the same thing and I will do my level best to give a very good answer to said question. But far as I'd listen how do people reach you?

How do they connect with you? How do they find out more about your site?

If they're thinking man, this is a good idea, I definitely want to check out your software because it sounds like it's going to save me hours in this strategy. What's the best way to do that?

Farzad Rashidi

00:45:13.570 - 00:45:52.230

Absolutely. My LinkedIn is Farzad Rashidi. There aren't a ton of us out there so fairly easy to spot. But our website is respana.com r e s p o n a dot com.

We have a ton of free, educational, ungated resources like the strategies I talked about. We have them publicly available on our website so you don't need any of these fancy tools.

If you're just starting out or you're a small business you can do a lot of it yourself manually.

And if you are a larger brand and you have some resources and don't want to do this manually then a tool like respondent would be a no brainer because it helps you save a ton of time with building some of these campaigns out for you.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:52.790 - 00:46:37.320

Fantastic. Fantastic.

We will of course link to Fahzad's information in the show notes as well, which you will either have come into your inbox if you're in the newsletter you can see them on the [email protected] or of course if you just scroll down in podcast app they will be there as well. But Faiz, I'd listen man. Genuinely great to meet you. Thanks Alex for connecting us. Really appreciate that and love the conversation man.

Lots of food for thought. Love the strategies. Super helpful for some of the other stuff we're doing in the business.

So I've got a conversation with the marketing team tomorrow where I get them to Listen to the episodes early. They're like, oh, great. More. But genuinely loved it, man. Really appreciate you taking the time and coming on and sharing those insights with us.

Farzad Rashidi

00:46:37.560 - 00:46:40.520

Of course. It's my pleasure. And thank you so much for having me, Matt.

Matt Edmundson

00:46:40.920 - 00:47:48.840

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. There you have it. What a great conversation. Huge thanks again to Fahzad for joining me today.

Now, be sure to follow the E Commerce Podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, because we've got yet more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. I never do. Hence the reason I say it every week. Now, in case no one has told you yet, today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes.

You are created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear. Fozat's gotta bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well.

Now, the E Commerce Podcast is produced by Pod Junction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

The team that makes this show possible includes the legend Sadaf Banon and Josh Edmondson, who wrote the theme music.

As I mentioned, if you would like to read the notes, the transcript, all that sort of stuff, you can find them on our website, which is ecommerce podcast.net. that's all one word. Ecommercepodcast.net but that's it from me. That's it from Fazza. Thank you so much for joining us.

Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

Farzad Rashidi

00:47:50.130 - 00:48:00.770

Sam.