B2B Lead Gen Podcast

In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, search optimization expert Juliette van Rooyen talks about how to get internal linking right, how to deal with keyword cannibalization, the easiest way to crawl one’s own site, some pointers in hiring the best developers for your website, and more.

Juliette is the founder and head of SEO services at VR Squared, and has worked within client-side and agency environments in London and Cape Town for the past 15 years.

As part of her SEO consulting in extremely competitive industries, she creates global SEO strategies that involve local SEO strategies for over 50 regions and more than ten languages and also solves technical SEO issues that affect key page performance.

Contextual Linking

While Juliette didn’t initially plan to get into SEO consulting, she naturally gravitated toward that path. Originally a developer, she felt that trying something different would be a breath of fresh air. “Given that I was used to working with code, over time, I’ve kind of naturally transitioned towards the more technical side of SEO, where utilizing code and understanding how it all works is a massive asset,” she shares.

On the topic of internal or contextual linking, Juliette mentions that it begins with your main navigation section. According to her, it can go both ways. Some businesses only link to their top-level pages, which doesn’t help people who want to navigate to more valuable content assets on the site. On the other hand, it’s also possible to overwhelm your audience with too many links. 

“One of the big things that help to ensure that you’re getting it (SEO) right on an ongoing basis,” says Juliette, “is to crawl your sites.” The easiest way to do this is using a site crawler like Screaming Frog, which Juliette has used for over a decade. A deep crawl would be particularly useful for enterprise-level sites.

In terms of finding and hiring the right developer for SEO projects, Juliette had this piece of advice: “Honestly, the best way to find someone good is to reach out to other people who are your connections in the industry; everybody knows someone else who’s doing what they do.” 

She added that word-of-mouth recommendations have been efficient when looking for a developer. And while the really high-end developers may be out of reach for small businesses with limited budgets, plenty of excellent developers work specifically with WordPress. ”Having professionals to do what they do best frees you up to do what you do best — and to actually sell your products.”

Keyword Cannibalization and Web Page Quality

Juliette also talks about how to deal with keyword cannibalization on your website. Keyword cannibalization is what happens when there are multiple pages on your website trying to rank for the same keyword.

With resources such as SEO Tools for Excel, Juliette and her team can discover and manage keyword cannibalization with ease. “It doesn’t matter how big or small your site is; there are often ways for you to consolidate that you’ve not considered,” she says. “Keyword cannibalization is a great signpost to say, ‘Guys, you’ve got a lot here.”

Naturally, improving webpage quality is another significant concern for SEO consultants. Juliette follows a simple process for dealing with subpar-quality websites with keyword-rich blog posts of little to no substance.

She starts by cataloging the existing blog posts and keywords and then pulling them together thematically. In doing this, she doesn’t go through every single blog (nor does she need to), instead pulling out core elements to assess and consolidate where each post belongs. “I would rather have 20 great pieces that are factual, rich, and decent-size than 500 pieces of fluff.”

Despite the long-perpetuated notion that “Content is king,” Juliette strongly advises against doing digital marketing just for the content’s sake. Rather, content creators must be mindful of how each piece of content helps them get closer to whatever goals they set for their sites and small businesses. Some important questions to ask: “How does this particular piece of content lead someone who lands on the site towards buying a piece of our products? What is the aim of the piece, and how does it fit into our plan?”

As for following versus not following, Juliette mentioned that Google updated its algorithm specifically to handle link-building and prevent people from paying for links. “I think that for a lot of people, especially large sites with a lot of user-generated content and the ability for people to influence what links might be on there, nofollow tends to be utilized quite widely.”

To hear more of Juliette’s insights, including the best way to track progress in attracting inbound links to your blog, know if your keyword strategy is correct and working, and the proper implementation of schema, make sure to listen to the full episode.

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In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, digital marketer and strategist Nick Wilsdon talks about the enterprise SEO strategies of major brands, working with SEO consultants, why big changes at Google could make or break your search engine visibility, and more.

Nick Wilsdon is the co-founder and CEO of TorquePartnership, a company that provides digital consultancy and search engine optimization advisory programs to enterprise clients. A keynote speaker, blogger, and contributor to industry publications such as The Drum, Reuters, and The Moscow Times, Nick Wilsdon is passionate about digital performance, integrated digital marketing campaigns, and joining up the dots.

According to Nick, there are major differences in how enterprises and small businesses approach SEO. Small businesses, for instance, are more focused on link building, whereas enterprises are more focused on the technical side of SEO since they deal with considerably larger websites. Enterprise SEO is B2C SEO. Small businesses serve consumers and other businesses, but it’s fair to say that most SEO B2B campaigns are launched on behalf of small businesses. “Link acquisition isn’t really as important for them,” Nick reveals. “They’ve got the authority. Usually, the thing that’s holding them back is tech, SEO, and implementing that.”

Nick also mentioned that to get a decent SEO strategy up and running for an enterprise, there’s a complex process that involves a lot of tweaking, fixing, and approvals. “There’s a lot of process and politics behind that, to get those things fixed. That takes a huge amount of strategy and thinking to push that through those organizations kind of.”

Another key difference is the sheer scale of enterprise SEO, a problem that small business SEO strategies don’t have to deal with. Even the seemingly simple act of making SEO changes must take the different teams and interests of the organization into consideration; Nick says that this often requires a “very strong business case” to justify those changes. “It involves [the specialist] understanding the commercial nature of the business, far more than most of the technical SEOs. So you have to have a balance between your technical knowledge, but also an understanding of what the business is trying to do and what the objectives are through the business.”

That’s why soft skills are important for people working in SEO: Being an expert on the nitty-gritty of SEO can only take you so far. “If you can’t convey the value of what you’re trying to do to senior stakeholders, then you’re never going to move up in your career, and you’re never going to make these kinds of projects land.”

Nick also took the time to emphasize the importance of internal linking, whether for enterprise sites, small business sites, or any other type of online business site. “Those internal links are absolutely fundamental,” stresses Nick, “and you should always be thinking, ‘If [I] have highly linked pages, and [I’m] going out with something that does attract links, where am I linking to internally from that page?”

Ironically, this is the aspect of SEO that’s often overlooked, according to Nick. One example is how when an internal link goes dead and goes to a 404 page, it no longer transfers any equity to your site. “As a small business owner, what are you doing to recover those links coming into your site? How are you making sure that you monitor them with some of the tools that are out there to make sure that they’re always live? Because it’s far easier to do link recovery and to monitor and maintain your current linking database, and it is to go out and get more links.”

With the overnight changes in the business landscape brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, Nick believes that now more than ever, it’s time to hop on the ecommerce bandwagon. Lockdowns and health restrictions have forced businesses to go “digital first” — and this transition has made businesses realize just how important it is to prioritize getting the digital aspects of their operations (such as digital orders) working, mainly because we don’t know what else to expect in the years to come. Nick cited the UK as an example, in which Black Friday and Christmas sales were restricted to digital events. “When people joke about what has caused the business transformation, ‘Has it been the CEO, the CTO, or COVID?’ It’s definitely been COVID. It’s pushed us 10 years ahead.”

When it comes to hiring an agency to work on SEO, Nick suggests that businesses should look at consultants before looking at agencies. “I think this also reflects how the market has changed,” Nick opines, citing how businesses these days tend to jump right into SEO execution without coming up with a decent plan first. “I would take the time to talk to a consultant, to really establish a plan and a blueprint for what [I’m] trying to do… Just to actually think behind this before you go into execution mode is so important.”

To hear more of Nick’s insights, including the knowledge gap some companies have regarding SEO, cross-platform campaigns, working with major brands like eBay, and finding reliable WordPress developers, listen to the full episode.

If you’re just getting started and need basic SEPO training, take my FREE SEO Course to bring yourself up to speed.

And to support this podcast, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts here.

In this episode we go deep into revenue attribution with Steffen Hedebrandt, chief revenue officer and cofounder at Dreamdata.io in Copenhagen, Denmark, an expert in digital revenue attribution, purchase intent and user tracking.

But before we get into the interview, here are some revenue attribution basics…

Revenue attribution is the aspect of marketing and sales analytics that allows businesses to understand how different digital touchpoints contribute to revenue generation. It involves identifying and assigning value to each interaction a customer has with a company, helping organizations optimize their marketing funnel so they can allocate their resources efficiently.

To excel in revenue attribution, marketers need to employ advanced analytics tools and platforms, align with their sales teams, and stay up to date on industry trends. Revenue attribution requires an understanding of data analysis, customer behavior, and marketing strategy. The best revenue attribution models help businesses allocate their budgets, improve their ROI, and make data-driven decisions for growth marketing.

Steffan serves primarily on B2B digital marketing agencies. His services help clients nurture leads through the sales cycle to a decision point, which hopefully results in a sale. As a result, he thinks a lot about keyword intent. The specific term someone searches says a great deal about there likelihood to complete a purchase. And this interview, he shares his formula for keyword intent strategy.

Does a lot work helping SaaS companies with 15-500 employees. He targets marketing directors and says direct sales in the fastest channel. Or you can try to capture the highest intent by purchasing traffic from very specific channels like Capterra or G2, where visitors are very far down the purchase funnel, essentially comparing competing services to each other, which is among the strongest indicators of intent to purchase because the buyer has already invested a lot of time and energy into researching a product category.

Marketers are starting to appreciate the difference between anonymous and authenticated user tracking. Anonymous user tracking platforms like Google Analytics track devices, rather than individuals. That means Google Analytics is limited in its ability to understand behavior, since the same customer journey can span a variety of different devices.

To get more customers, you need to understand the entire journey from start to finish and not just the last click. Google Analytics attempts to she light on the journey with its Multi Channel Funnel Assisted Conversions report, but its accuracy is limited by user anonymity. Customer data platforms, on the other hand, use email address to circumvent double counting the same users on different devices. Customer data platforms and CRMs are ways to count authenticated user activity, which is always going to be more accurate.

Generally speaking, for impulse purchases, direct to consumer purchases, or any other purchase where the cell cycle is relatively short, Google analytics offers all sorts of great insights for increasing conversions. However, if on the other hand you are a B2B assuring prospects through the sales cycle, the information from Google analytics is probably going to be a bit more scattered and less useful.

We also spoke about the previous podcast interviews I recorded with Justin Cutroni, who at the time was independent but who currently works for Google. Most advertising platforms use tracking parameters to minimizes the number of users who are tracked as “direct” visitors. One way to make sure your links don’t register as “direct” is by using the Campaign URL Builder tool to assign UTM parameters to your links.

Email marketing metrics are not what they used to be. Cybersecurity software monitors inbound emails, sometimes triggering what looks like an email open, but in fact was not. If you want to be sure that someone actually opened your email, you want to see a minimum of two opens. That way you know it was the person who opened the email, and not software scanning inbound email messages prior to distributing them to the recipient. Better yet, use click thrus and responses as a more accurate measure of engagement. For more on email marketing best practices, check out my Email Marketing Guide.

If you’d like to get a look a look at the Dreamdata.io customer data platform, reach out to Steffen for help with solve their multi-touch attribution challenges and they work particularly well with companies using best-of-breed stacks. In the tradition of product-led marketing, Dreamdata has a free tier you can play around with to see if it’s a fit for you.

In the intricate world of revenue attribution, there exists a pervasive challenge that often goes unspoken in vendor discussions (Steffan and I did not discuss this) — the issue of platforms aggressively vying for credit and, at times, even doubling down on attribution.

This “dirty little secret” reveals that advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing platforms are not always forthcoming about their role in conversions. It’s not uncommon to witness two or more platforms claiming the same revenue, which can muddy the waters of accurate attribution.

The challenge at hand lies in unraveling this complex web of attribution to ensure transparency, fairness, and a more realistic understanding of each platform’s contribution to conversions. Effective data collection methods, unbiased attribution models, and a critical eye toward the credit-taking tendencies of platforms are essential to navigate this unspoken challenge in the world of revenue attribution.

In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, cryptocurrency investor, entrepreneur, and public relations executive Michael Terpin shares insights into the challenges of promoting cryptocurrency through public relations efforts, the critical issue of data protection and security – particularly in the context of telecom companies like AT&T. Terpin recounts a personal experience in which he falls victim to SIM card swapping fraud, leading to the theft of his cryptocurrency assets. Terpin’s subsequent legal action against AT&T highlights the importance of robust security measures in safeguarding not only cryptocurrency but also individuals’ personal information and digital identities. He calls for regulatory changes and enhanced data protection practices within the telecommunications industry, and share insight on promoting ICOs, and other way of promoting cryptocurrencies.

In 2013 Michael Terpin co-founded BitAngels, an investment network for blockchain technology startups and the first angel network for bitcoin and digital currency startups with 500 international investors. In 2014, he founded Transform Group, a bitcoin and blockchain marketing and PR firm headquartered in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which promotes initial coin offerings (ICOs). More on that latter. Terpin also runs CoinAgenda, the leading conference series connecting mainstream investors with blockchain and cryptocurrency investors.

Before we get into Michael Terpin’s interview, let’s cover some cryptocurrency marketing basics…

Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a fundraising method commonly used in the blockchain and cryptocurrency startup industry to raise capital. Some ICOs are handled by the actual startups minting the new cryptocurrency. And sometimes they hire a PR firm.

In an ICO, a company or project issues a new cryptocurrency or token to investors in exchange for traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum or fiat currency. These tokens represent a stake or utility within the project’s ecosystem. ICOs gained popularity as a way for startups to secure funding quickly, but they have also faced regulatory scrutiny due to potential risks and fraudulent activities.

It’s essential for investors to conduct thorough research and due diligence before participating in an ICO, as the cryptocurrency market can be volatile and risky.

Fiat currency is a type of currency that a government has declared to be legal tender for transactions within its jurisdiction. Unlike commodity money (such as gold or silver), which has intrinsic value, fiat currency has no inherent value and is not backed by a physical commodity. Instead, its value is based on the trust and confidence that people have in the government and the stability of its economy.

Examples of fiat currencies include the US Dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), Japanese Yen (JPY), and many others. These currencies are used for everyday transactions, such as buying goods and services, paying taxes, and settling debts. Central banks and governments have the authority to issue and regulate fiat currency, including controlling its supply through monetary policy measures like interest rates and money printing.

Fiat currencies are the most common form of currency in the world today and are essential for the functioning of modern economies.

Terpin thinks the term “cryptocurrency” is not be entirely accurate, as most governments treat it more as property or a commodity than traditional currency. He suggested that “crypto commodities” might be a more suitable term.

The origins of cryptocurrencies trace back to Bitcoin and its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, who introduced the concept in response to the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent actions of central banks. Satoshi’s white paper, published in late 2008, laid the foundation for Bitcoin and blockchain technology.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger operating on thousands of computers worldwide, with no centralized ownership. Terpin likens it to the internet’s decentralized architecture, ensuring resilience and redundancy.

Bockchain technology is groundbreaking because it brings together various existing technologies to create a revolutionary system that withstandsnumerous challenges and attacks over the years. Terpin also notes the humble beginnings of Bitcoin, initially used for gambling and only later finding its first real-world use when one miner paid another 10,000 Bitcoin for a pizza in 2010.

Eric Schwartzman 14:34
Why are so many different types of cryptocurrency because Bitcoin is a type of Ethereum as a type Dogecoin is a type you actually as part of your business do what’s called an ICO an initial not not public offering, but coin offering, where you actually help organizations that are launching new coins make a market for those coins.

Michael Terpin 14:59
Well, I ICO is not even a term that’s used anymore. That was kind of a term from 2017 and 18. And I wasn’t the one who was staging them. We were simply doing marketing or advisory work for other companies who were innovated at model. So we worked with the very first company to do an initial coin offering. Yeah, it’s again, like cryptocurrencies sort of an unfortunate word. Because if they simply called a token starter, like Kickstarter would actually be a little bit more relevant, because it’s not, it’s not an offering of a security. You know, under the US sec, under Clayton J. Clayton, the the past chairman of the SEC, under Trump, he basically looked and said, You know, I think most of these things are securities proved to me that they’re not as opposed to actually have any regulation. He went back and said, Well, we have the 1933 Act. And we have the howey test, which was a Supreme Court ruling on what was and wasn’t a security based on the differences between orange futures and wine futures, and had nothing to do with technology. It had nothing to do with the innovations of the internet. It actually predated, you know, mainstream television, much light and computers. So, you know, under the current regime, under Biden, and under Gensler, who has just recently been approved, we’re expecting that there will actually be hearings, and there will actually be definitions, instead of saying, hey, go back to the 1930s and fight it out in court. So that will be you know, there is currently a proposal by the longest standing Commissioner on the SEC, Hester purse, who was a republican appointee under Obama.

So she’s a little bit apolitical to control as the chairman. So now you have a three to maturity for the Democrats. But, you know, for the most part, I wouldn’t say that it’s really kind of a mainstream political issue. I think it’s really a definition of trying to figure out what regulation to put this other because right now, in the United States, you’ve got the IRS since 2014, has said that Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies or property fincen has set its money. And the ctfc has implied that as commodities, like gold, and so you have to have some agreement about what this is, or else, you know, everybody has to kind of just guess, on their own. And for the most part, what they’ve done is American entrepreneurs have left the United States and simply done everything outside of the United States, because they’re just afraid that they’re going to get it wrong, because there’s no clarity about what’s what getting it right is. And so most jurisdictions, the United outside of the United States and a few other jurisdictions, you know, have said, No, we know what it is. I mean, Singapore is what it is. And, you know, some other places have said, yes, if you do that, if you do a, a a token generation event in our jurisdiction, here are the rules. within the United States, Wyoming has said, we will exempt you as not being a security if you meet the following criteria, because the SEC has said Bitcoin is not a security. They said Ethereum is not a security, but they had this kind of vague definition that if you’re using a token to go and build something that doesn’t exist, then it’s a security, which is kind of an odd thing, because that’s what Kickstarter does, right. And Kickstarter is are typically not considered securities, because you don’t have any equity interest in the company. And so we’re in this very gray area right now that most entrepreneurs simply don’t deal with us. And they simply go offshore. And they, you know, they they start companies in Singapore. And it’s a shame because this is all taxable revenue, that that is saying, we want to be a US company. And so there’s been a flocking of companies to Wyoming, because Wyoming, which two years ago was two, three years ago and forget when the the first legislation was, you know, very, you know, kind of, I wouldn’t say anti crypto, they just simply their existing regulations that you couldn’t even, you know, donate Bitcoin. And then that was considered money laundering of some form. And Caitlyn long, who is incredibly bright woman and a friend of mine, who, you know, graduated from the University of Wyoming, you know, went to New York spent 25 years on Wall Street at Morgan Stanley primarily, and then got into cryptocurrency early, she wanted to go and donate Bitcoin to her University. And they said, Well, you can donate cash. But, you know, from our reading, it’s against the law for you to donate Bitcoin. She said, That’s ridiculous. She moved back to Wyoming. She got that law changed and clarified in Wyoming. And while she was there, she decided that she could turn Wyoming into a crypto capital for the United States and she working with the you know, Wyoming governor that we’re having legislature have now passed over 70 laws and there’s been A boom of companies moving to Wyoming to do token sales there because Wyoming will go and say, under our securities administration, we will say if you are this, this and this, we will say you’re not a security and you can go and raise, you know, you can sell your token, and will not be considered a security to consider like a crowd sale like a Kickstarter. And which is taxable. Right. So it’s 21%. Tax.

Eric Schwartzman 20:27
So walk me through that. Because if I if I have cash, right, and I wire it to my Coinbase account, right, and and then I buy cryptocurrency, and the cryptocurrency goes up, and then I want to sell the, I want to I want to take some of my earnings off the table, I pay capital gains tax on that, yes. How How does that work? I just when I transfer it out of Coinbase, or, well, no, this is taxable event.

Michael Terpin 20:59
So the taxable event is anytime you trade it before 2018, it was only when you turn it into fiat currency, but January 2018, they implemented something called the guilty tax, gi LTI. I like to say it’s your guilty until proven innocent. And so if you buy bitcoin for say $10,000. And then you end up saying I think aetherium is better, and you end up buying aetherium at $1,000. You know, a year ago or whatever was last $1,000 you have to immediately pay tax on your profit from Bitcoin from 1000 to Ethereum, even though you don’t cash it in, you have to sell enough to be able to pay the tax on it. That happened in 2018.

Eric Schwartzman 21:40
So when you had your, your your difficulty with at&t, and when you were when you were robbed, you were robbed coins in native wallets. It didn’t affect your Bitcoin or your aetherium just really quickly paint a picture for us of the different types of currencies and how they’re generally used.

Michael Terpin 22:02
Sure. So again, a blockchain is open source software, Bitcoin is open source software. And, you know, Satoshi came out and said, this is a peer to peer money system. But you know, it’ll develop as the world wants to develop it. And metallic butyrin, who I met before, he did Ethereum, and through Anthony Diorio, who’s a good friend of mine in Toronto, and, you know, I met him in sort of like the days just after he started the Toronto Bitcoin meetup. And he became a client, and again, a good friend. And he introduced me to metallic and actually, I think I met metallic through someone else around the same time, but anyway, it was a very small circle of people in Toronto at the time, late 20, you know, the mid 2013. And, and, you know, metallic came up with a concept of being able to go and make Bitcoin you know, take some of the weaknesses of Bitcoin in terms of its programmability on chain, and to create a new cryptocurrency that would actually allow you to create smart contracts on chain, whereas with Bitcoin, you can’t do that. With Bitcoin, you have to create things off chain that would then have smart contract ability, or at least some form of that. And he really saw I think, brilliantly at age 19, in his white paper, the use case for having cryptocurrency, actually, you know, automatically enable commerce, right? So in other words, if you got, you know, let’s, let’s take the shipping industry, in the shipping industry, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars globally, you have this very archaic system where you have to have a bill of lading you have to have like money wired here, and then you have to make sure everything is there. You can put that on a blockchain. And but with Bitcoin, it’s still on the blockchain, just to enable the payment and it’s not automatic, you’d still be checking things and then sending other things and there are there are innovators trying to build things on top of Bitcoin. But you know, bitcoins, you know, kind of slowness, and it’s, it’s well designed for what it’s become, which is a store of value and a large movement of dollars. It’s lousy at paying for a cup of coffee was original thought that someone could do, because, you know, the fees have gone up as the security has gone up. And it’s all based on algorithms. Ethereum was originally you know, sort of seen as a, it’s still really pretty much as as a world computer as the ability to be able to go and program smart contracts that will self execute, so that if I have a contract with you, and it’s in code, I don’t need to have a court to enforce it. It basically says if this is done, this is done and this is done. Then the payment automatically goes through. So when the ship arrives, it will go in, you’ll scan things see if that’s what what matters. To the scattered programming to the blockchain, and a lot of that automatically deliver the funds. And obviously garbage in garbage out if the if everything is arrives is broken, but the code is still there. Maybe it goes through, and then you have to have some dispute mechanism for like, Is it broken or whatever. But, you know, we’re still in the early days of this, but Ethereum, you know, did do what was called an Ico background. And that was $18 million that they sold in, in theory of the tokens at 30 cents apiece, you know, they recently reached the high of over 40 $300 apiece. So obviously, there was a very good purchase of that. And, you know, the SEC said, well, it might have been a security at the time, but we’re not going to prosecute them. They were, of course, were largely Canadians who, who did do the offering the sale out of Switzerland, but they did not block us investors. The, you know, sort of, you know, it’s because there’s no regulations, it’s hard to, it’s hard to go and say what what prosecution’s will be because there’s no regulations, and so everybody is aching for other regulations.

Eric Schwartzman 26:06
But let me read you a little snippet from Scott Galloway’s podcast this morning. He says, in some, Facebook and YouTube have said, we’re all about creators, they could give a fuck about creators. There’s millions of creators on these platforms that have realized you can’t make any money. These guys, Facebook and YouTube are going to start all the margin from that. And occasionally, there’ll be some very well publicized examples of some crazy gamers, or some crazy YouTubers, that makes two 3 million bucks. But meanwhile, Google is they’re only making two to $3 billion every week. So So here’s my question. You’ve seen you’ve been following this. I mean, you and I talked about this when you first got started in it. So you’ve been following this and you’ve been your nose to the grindstone on this for over a decade now. I know of three I can name three cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, aetherium and Dogecoin. That’s all I know. So I didn’t know much about those quite until Ilan started tweeting about it. So So the question is, this, is it the same thing as the as the social networks, where everyone’s sort of running in and two or three people get lucky and wind up becoming mega influencers and making all this money, but everyone else is just starch and all the margin for for somebody else to make the money? Or our most how many cryptocurrencies are out there and how many actually are valuable?

Michael Terpin 27:38
Sure, so there’s about 10,000 cryptocurrencies out there, and the vast majority have little to no value. But you could say the same thing about startups. Right, how many startups are out there that are, how many screenplays are out there? I mean, you know, so it’s, it’s the the long tail effect of anything. So you have a handful of cryptocurrencies that have an active community. And, you know, I and they come they go up and down over time, if you look at the top 10 kryptos, in 2013 I think Bitcoin and Litecoin are the only ones that are still in the top 10 today, in fact, I don’t think like Quinn’s even the top 10 anymore, I think it’s out of the top 10 now, and there were other things called dev coin, and, and, you know, namecoin, that, you know, are, you know, were the top 10 that are that are, you know, infinitesimally small now, because the communities kind of want a whammy. namecoin for example, you know, its initial purpose was to act as a token that you’d be able to go and build domain names on, and have them be decentralized, it was a great idea, they just didn’t, you know, execute well, and they, they had sort of, like, you know, all these kind of, you know, kind of, you know, people came in and grabbed all these names and never did anything with them. And it still exists, but it’s like, you know, a fraction of what it was in terms of the, you know, value to a Bitcoin. On the other hand, there have been other ones that have now built on a theory on which is much more of an actionable network. And, you know, there’s three of them, one of which I’m an advisor to called butterfly protocol, bee fly is the token. And, you know, they ended up doing a token sale, they don’t call them Icos anymore. And, you know, again, get it outside of the United States. And, you know, they’ve been kind of up and down since then, because cryptocurrencies this year have been kind of wildly volatile, but, you know, even even at today’s price, I think they’re about three or four times the price of what they went out, and they’re still developing, right. And so they’re, they’re, they’re letting people go in and be able to develop, you know, domains. So you could actually have, you can go and buy the rights to dot Eric, and it would then on a Chrome browser, you’d be able to go in and say hey, go to you know, just just Download this, just like with the brave browser, you have to download an extension. You just download this extension, you can go and get, you know, all these dot Eric addresses CAD data Eric has not been purchased yet. And so there’s a few other entities out there that are doing similar things. One has the.nf t domain. But again, you need their extension.

Eric Schwartzman 30:23
And they’re all let me let me ask you some about NF serious for a second. Sure. So so if I wanted, I have a book out, I have a new book. If I wanted to sell my book as an NF T. How would I do that?

Michael Terpin 30:39
So we’re still early in the NFT process. I mean, you could literally just mint it and put it out there. And you have to what is missing was missing is when you actually go and you issue the NF T’s because they’re non fungible tokens. Bitcoin is a fungible token one bitcoin is just like another Bitcoin that completely exchangeable for another NF T is a stands for non fungible token. So on certain blockchains, you’d have the ability to go and mint, a token that has completely different capability capabilities are not capabilities, but properties then then other ones that the original concept of an NF T was actually called a colored coin, where he took Bitcoin and he’d say, Hey, I have one bitcoin, which, you know, maybe back then was only worth $10, or something. And each Bitcoin has 100 million pieces, called satoshis. And you would go and say, I’m going to take this Bitcoin, it’s always gonna be worth at least one bitcoin. But I’m now going to go and put memos in the field saying, you know, access Eric’s book or whatever. And if I had that particular coin with that memo field in it, I can go in and send it to a program that would then unlock the ability to to get your book. However, it was, again, not nice, yes, a mobi file, like what would they unlock whatever you want. So if you’re getting now to the more up to date version, which is which runs largely on a cerium, although anything running the IBM and other smart, contract oriented blockchains is able to do this, as well as some that are that are not as smart contracts, it’s able to go in and create a secure way. So it’s still very early in terms of the technology right now, if you look at the you know, $70 million NFT, that, that, you know, people created, there’s a unique token that was issued on aetherium using the ERC 721 standard, which is different than the ERC 20 standard for fungible tokens. And you would have the private key that will unlock that, and nobody else in the world could unlock it.

Eric Schwartzman 32:48
So then with something like a book, if I were to sell it as an NF T, would I be selling the rights of the book, or how would it know like,

Michael Terpin 32:57
whatever, you can sell whatever you want it I mean, the typical thing is you would sell, perhaps, say 1000 books and you admit 1000, lefties. And so I’m actually an advisor and investor in a company called rare AR AR, they’re a rare dot tech, that is taking a watermarking technology on a blockchain that will simplify the security as well as because right now, if you want to have a book out, you’d have you have two choices, you either want, I say three choices, you go to a publisher, and they do everything for you, and they take, you know, lion’s share of the profits, and then even on the ebook sales, they have to go up, say 30%, to to Amazon, before you then get your royalty, which was 10%, or whatever it’s going to be. And, or you can go directly to Amazon and just sort of be under the great unwashed of the the non traditional publishers, and they will take 70%. And then you have to kind of fight out for visibility there. And if they don’t like it, they can say we’re not going to put your book up. Or you can go and just have your website, put your PDF up and just hope that people don’t copy it, or put some kind of watermarking on there, which usually this hacks more. So what rare does is it enables you to still put something on your website as well as the different portals that could be powering. And you can say I wouldn’t be issuing 1000 nF T’s for my book, I’m going to be charging $20 for it. The way rare works is you get to the standard that they get it’s customizable, is that you’ll get 90% of that. So you’ll get you know $18 out of the 20 rare as the enabler will get 9% and the note holders will get 1% because they’re having to actually run the tokens that in a decentralized fashion, generate the key that will let each individual person unlock the book. So you’ll have 1000 separate tokens. And those tokens each represent one copy of the book. Now you can serialize them a number of them if you want like Think about the way a serigraph would be in our, you can have that maybe a random 10 of them have some goodies in it like a kind of a Pokemon prize. And that’s, you know that that’s a rare video or it’s a, or it’s an airdrop of, you know, like, you know, a free $795 seminar that a lot or something like that. So or you can have those goodies put into a rarer version of it. So maybe you only have 10 of the, you know, kind of superduper VIP version, you know, like you used to be able to go have tiers on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, I think that’s going to develop down to having tiers of NFT. So we’re really at the beginning of tiers. And that’s one reason why Ethereum price has gone from $80 to over 4000, a little over a year was because the two hottest areas and in tech right now in blockchain tech are NF T’s, which are largely aetherium in terms of volume of sales, and, and d phi. And both of those, though, have competitive blockchains and competitive solutions to you know, Ethereum, Originally, it was sort of the faster, better, cheaper model, and now, they’ve gotten so big that they’re, you know, fees have gone astronomical in some cases. I mean, sometimes it’s gonna cost you over $100 for a single planet T. What is crypto staking? Why he really bouncing around here. So crypto staking, is where you’re going and taking a cryptocurrency. And they have a solution within the blockchain, or within the company that that created the blockchain or the foundation that created the blockchain, that you get rewarded for locking up a certain number of tokens. I’d say one of the earliest ones to do that would be a company we worked with the early days called dash. Dash basically had this thing called masternodes. And if you had 1000, Master nodes, if you got 1000 coins, you’d be able to go and put them into a masternode that would then help secure the network. And it would also get, like 7% a year or the mining rewards that be distributed to the node holders. And so it’s effectively a form of interest. Although the IRS has implied in that manner, the formal statements that is considered ordinary income as opposed to capital gains.

Eric Schwartzman 37:28
Is there an easy way? For someone who’s listening to this? They’ve got some risk capital, they got 10, Grand 50 grand, and they want to get it into crypto, but they don’t want to spend a frickin week learning which app to use and what a cold wallet is, and which one to buy and how to do it. Is there an easy way to go to just get some money into crypto? And that’s like

Michael Terpin 37:56
saying, Is there an easy way to be an entrepreneur and easy way to become a millionaire? You know, it all depends what kind of time you’re willing to invest in terms of what your returns are going to be like, in general in life. And again, disclosure, I’m not a financial adviser, I’m not a CFA or anything, I’m just somebody with a lot of experience in the field. And so these are only my opinions and do your own research. But you know, I mean, if, if you got 10,000 to invest, and you know, you have no cryptocurrency at all, I would think the safest thing is just simply, you know, put half a Bitcoin and half in theory, those are the large caps, those the ones that are going to go to zero. And, you know, right now there’s been a bit of a pullback and both of them because of the the tweet that Ilan did saying he was, you know, stop taking Bitcoin for buying Tesla is a complete overreaction, my thoughts. So I’m still you know, firmly of the belief that Bitcoin will be over 100,000 by the end of the year, because that’s about where we are in the four year cycles. I then think that for the most part, when it hits those highs, you should take a little bit off the table and buy some back when it hits the lows, which are usually it’s kind of an every other year for them and on so you so far hit your all time highs, the cycle and 2013 2017 and 2021. And you hit your lows of the cycle in, you know, 2015 and then 2019. And so the odds are, are based on a lot of you know, technical analysis that will continue to hit a higher high by the end of this year 2021. And then we’ll go and hit, you know, the low for the next cycle in 2023. And then hit another high in 2025. What do you like for what, which app Do you like and which cold wallet do you like? Oh, so, you know, it all depends on what you’re using it for. I mean for apps. You know, we have a client called Abra AB era and they’re they’re a good app. They let you go in and sort of have a wallet solution and exchange solution all in one. They’re, you know, Silicon Valley based and they also have a capacity for like, you know, earning interest and, and also taking out loans. So they’re kind of a one stop shop for a lot of the things you might want to do in, in crypto. They’re, you know, Silicon Valley, you know, companies, so they’re not like some crazy offshore thing. That everything offshore is crazy. And then for wallets, you know, typically, you’re gonna have your long term holdings. If you get you know, more than like, say $50,000 with a crypto, you want to keep it typically in a hardware wallet. So, I like ledger, that’s a company out of France. It’s been around for a while, and then Tresor was sort of the original one. Either one of them are very secure. Second, because I didn’t quite hear the SEC rise or t r e ZOR. Okay. I think there’s also a company that, you know, I was early advisor to called Adam grave that, you know, they did a Indiegogo last year to sort of fund their, their initial hardware wallets, and there’ll be shipping them within the next few months.

Eric Schwartzman 41:18
Well, Michael, you know, it has been very interesting, as usual. And thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Where can people get a hold of you? What’s going on with the conference? When when is coin agenda striking it back up again?

Michael Terpin 41:32
Sure. So I’m delighted to say we had we haven’t announced this formally. I think it’s on the website now. But we put the announcements out in the next couple days, we will be having three physical events. Our last physical that was point agenda, Caribbean last year in February just before everything locked down, and we had to have our Quint agenda low global last October virtually because you know, Las Vegas had not opened up. So we have an annual global event in Las Vegas that runs you know, sort of adjacent to the money 2020 shows. And so we will be having that this year. And let me make sure I get the date, right. It is the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at the end of October. And that is the 25th to 27th October 25 to 27th. And it should be up on coin agenda.com. We will also be having our fifth annual sets our eighth annual coin agenda. In global that will be our fifth annual coin agenda Caribbean in San Juan. I started the first cryptocurrency conferences in the Caribbean when I when I moved down to San Juan, and it’s our fifth year and that’s going to be very heavy on the NFT or we’re going to have a week after our basil this year. It’s going to be December 6 grade in San Juan. So go to our basil and you know check out the NFT art and other art there and then hop down to San Juan for beautiful weather and we’re gonna have some great speakers there. And then we are going to be holding our first Quint agenda Europe since 2018, usually just to Europe, in Asia during bull markets. And we’ll be having that in Monaco. And that is at the end of September. I believe the tentative dates are the 28th to 30th. But we have not confirmed that there’ll be on the site shortly but they will be in Monaco, right after the show. Do you have a venue for Vegas? Yes, we do. New York, New York to be and what about here and every year every year we have a different venue. What about Puerto Rico? We are living in San Juan. We are talking to two different places. We are most likely to be in the yellow sun one hotel, but we haven’t confirmed the app. It’ll probably be an easel narrative. Great. Which is right near the airport in the city. Michael great catching up movies.

Eric Schwartzman 44:04
Thank you so much for taking the time. Okay, thank you. To master b2b content marketing, you can listen to the first chapter of my new book the digital pivot for free at Digital pivot book.com

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Smartbug’s Chief Revenue Officer and RevOps analyst Jen Spencer talks about her recent benchmarking report on the convergence of inbound marketing and revenue operations (RevOps): a survey of 200-plus revenue leaders that includes a RevOps framework for how best to adapt to these trends.

Rev Ops — or the alignment of technology and processes to support the collaboration of marketing, sales and customer success efforts — has become increasingly popular as companies look reorganize to support the full customer lifecycle.

We also talk about RevOps strategies and the kinds of apps that most businesses are using and how that will change moving forward, the importance of integrated technology to most companies, and why cross functional collaboration is the new competitive advantage.

01:27​ What is RevOps or revenue operations?

03:23​ Smartbug’s survey on revenue operations, digital marketing, sales and customer success.

05:06​ What is a tech stack?

06:46​ Defining small business tech stacks.

10:23​ All-in-one tech platform solutions vs. best-of-breed stacks.

14:29​ Interoperable stacks and retaining customer data.

17:20​ The meaning of digital business, and how to build one.

20:04​ Trends in CRM and integrating best-of-breed stacks across marketing, sales, and customer success.

21:52 HubSpot versus Salesforce: Which solution is right for you?

24:12 Cross functional integration as a competitive barrier to entry.

27:43 How account-based marketing creates a more unified customer experience.

29:25 How customer account data helps sellers create raving fans.

32:02 RevOps metrics for measuring marketing and customer success correctly.

34:08 Why cross-functional collaboration matters in the modern enterprise.

With 30% marketshare, WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) on the Internet today. Unsurprisingly, plugins designed to work with it, especially those that use the freemium business model to convert free to premium subscribers, also enjoy tremendous popularity and loyalty from their users.

In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, sociologist and digital maven Marieke van de Rakt PhD talks about the intricacies of running an SEO company, technical aspects of SEO consulting, how the pandemic has affected businesses, and more.

Marieke is the CEO of Yoast, a popular WordPress plugin used by more than 11 million people to make their website easier for Google to index. Armed with a PhD in Social Sciences, she is focused not just on Yoast’s growth, but also the company’s online SEO training academy, which offers free and premium subscriptions. 

Yoast’s SEO business growth (and keeping up with Google)

Yoast offers both a free version and a paid (premium) version with added features for site maintenance, site structure, and other SEO essentials. And for a plugin such as Yoast that works with WordPress — a content management system built on open source, public domain software — the premium version serves as the support system that allows the free version to keep being operational. “If you have an SEO plugin for 11 million sites, and you’re not making any money off of it, that’s not possible anymore,” Marieke explains. “So I think it’s in the best interest of the whole WordPress community that we make money from it, so that we can give back to the people.”

In order to keep up with Google’s changes, Yoast maintains a close relationship with the internet giant. This involves maintaining constant communication with Google, or at least its relevant departments. “I don’t see Google as one company,” shares Marieke. “They’re so big that they don’t know everything.” 

There are certain limitations, though. A major algorithm change, for instance, is not something Yoast can immediately address until the team fully understands the extent of the changes. “So it’s a lot of conversation and a lot of testing. And that keeps us up to speed.”

Reinventing the idea of SEO for small business

With approximately 400 million small- and medium-sized businesses in the global economy, Yoast has only really penetrated less than one percent of that ever-growing community. According to Marieke, their focus on WordPress is likely the biggest deterrent toward growing their market share. 

Marieke says that Yoast is currently in the process of tweaking Yoast SEO for other platforms aside from WordPress. However, she also notes that such ventures are unlikely to scale as big as WordPress, which holds the lion’s share of the CMS market. However, she still thinks that there’s plenty of room for Yoast to grow, even if it’s just within WordPress. “There are a lot of challenges — and a lot of people who can build a website start with WordPress, which is good.”

Many small businesses have yet to take the leap towards the digital business game, which Marieke attributes to the inherent difficulty in putting together a WordPress site, as opposed to how easy it is to just create a Facebook page or an Instagram account. “On a website, you own your own stuff, and you have everything on your own domain. WordPress makes it the easiest part to get; the thing going on that it’s yours, and you can do with it what you want. But that takes a little bit of training.” 

Despite these challenges, Marieke still believes that people should own their own websites and own their own digital identity. She also proudly proclaims that their mission is SEO for everyone, which is why the Yoast Academy is offering free courses for everyone. “WordPress’s mission is democratizing publishing, so we want to make it possible for everyone to make their own website. But nobody cares; If nobody finds your website, you don’t want to have a website without an audience.”

Understanding site structure

Marieke has this tip for small businesses when it comes to their site structure: “Google uses your internal linking structure to index your site. So you should always keep that in mind when you’re structuring your site or when you’re linking pages to each other, because Google follows those links.” She explains that the way you structure your website, along with the way you internally link one page to another, is the same way Google determines which of your pages are the most important ones.

Last year, Yoast implemented an update that significantly improved the plugin’s performance. According to Marieke, they sought to solve the issue of Yoast being as “bloated” as other plugins out there. “Now, we are much faster than we used to be. We are saving our data in a different way. We built our own indexable tables, which also gets us ready to go for a headless WordPress system as well.”

To hear more of Marieke’s insights, including contextual linking, WooCommerce, and the impact of the pandemic on recurring revenue, make sure to listen to the full episode.And to support this podcast, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts here.

In this episode, writer, investor and entrepreneur Chris Yeh talks about B2B Growth Marketing – which he calls Blitzscaling: The Lightning Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies in a book he wrote with Linkedin CEO Reid Hoffman on scaling B2B ventures – which explains how companies like Amazon, AirBNB, and Uber use a very specific set of offensive, competitive strategies that prioritize speed over profitability to achieve massive scale at incredible speed.

We also discuss how Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos is blitzscaling at Amazon, Uber’s growth scaling strategy, and racism in the venture capital community.

In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, Scott Brinker, vice president of platform ecosystem at HubSpot and editor at Chief MarTech talks about stack business value with marketing technology.

Brinker is also chair of the MarTech Conference and an MIT Sloan School of Management graduate.

He launched Chiefmartec.com 13 years ago to explore the intermingling of marketing and technology before B2B customer journeys were well understood and before the concept of B2B content marketing funnels or B2B lead generation evolved.

The site, whose name is an abbreviation of the “Chief Marketing Technologist” job title, covers the latest digital marketing news and produces its own trade show.

Though he’s still very invested in Chiefmartec, Scott spends most of his time at Hubspot, which became prominent a few years ago by investing in B2B content marketing.

“We found that pivot point where people were going more and more to the internet to make decisions about who they wanted to do business with, the whole shift from outbound sales and heavy advertising budgets to a model that would attract customers by publishing content that was useful to them, would show up in Google and social networks,” Brinker says.

Although they have enterprise clients, Hubspot is seeing the most growth in the midmarket, so they’re not just marketing to a CTO persona. They’re selling directly to founders and entrepreneurs as well.

Since then, Hubspot has become a full martech stack for marketing, sales, and customer service, with around 700 third-party app partners marketing SaaS applications to integrate with their platform. Scott celebrates the explosion of the Hubspot ecosystem, but he also sees it as a big challenge.

“Sure, I can buy all these specialized tools, but do I get them to work together? My mission at Hubspot is to help solve that problem by saying, ‘Ok, Hubspot is at the center of your stack, we’d like to work with all those companies that have out-of-the-box integration, so you just don’t have to think about that, you just plug them in and they work,” he says.

One of the big changes brought about by Hubspot is giving many small businesses the chance to use advanced digital marketing tools. But how can a small start-up spec its stack, get a scope study going and minimize risk?

“A small business that is new to this should not read my blog, it will only distract them and freak them out”, Scott says with a smile. Not surprisingly, he suggests resorting to Hubspot instead. “It does so much out of the box and it provides such good educational materials. It’s just the way to go,” says Brinker.

He says that while much of the digital marketing tech is cool, when you’re optimizing the web experience with content marketing, search engine optimization, and email marketing, the real work is the actual content creation and lead qualification.

Brinker says Hubspot minimizes the risk of winding up with a Frankenstack. Still, like anything else in the software world, successful deployments rely on how well you gather data across different functions, fine-tune the customer experience, and customize your workflows.

But for the right customers, Hubspot’s integrated sales, service, and marketing applications are an off-the-shelf revenue operations stack worth looking into.

Listen to the full interview with Scott Brinker, and if you’d like to support this podcast, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts here.

In this podcast which will be of interest to Ecommerce marketing agencies, I spoke with SoundCommerce CEO Eric Best, a 20-year commerce vet who’s worked at Amazon and Liberty Interactive.

He was CSO at CommerceHub through its IPO, CEO and founder at Mercent, and cofounder at Impresys, Emercis, and MindCorps.

In this interview, he talks to us about why some website marketing companies outperform, how he approaches ecommerce marketing and how Google’s plans to eliminate cookies will change website marketing strategy.

Subscribe to the B2B Lead Gen Podcast.

In this episode, Katie Kern, COO of Media Frenzy Global, a public relations agency with offices in Atlanta, and London, discusses Clubhouse, the Meghan Markle Oprah Winfrey interview, the #BlackWomenatWork hashtag, Billie Holiday, alternate realities, diversity, inclusion, and much, much more. She’s an expert at getting press coverage for her clients.

Kern started as a retail coordinator at Reebok, and after that she started her own PR agency specializing in fashion and lifestyle brands. Next, she became a partner at Media Frenzy. Reebok was her first job after graduating from college, “and it was a great, great launching pad for me, I got to work with many global brands. I couldn’t ask for any more from a learning standpoint. I was managing millions of dollars in retail marketing budget.”

Kern says she’s bullish on the potential of Clubhouse as a B2B content marketing tool, having recently hosted a mixer on the nascent audio service for a client involved with SXSW. “I’m more of a listener than I am a host. I like to go and just kind of listen to what people has to say”, she explains. Clubhouse can be used as a virtual event platform, which is especially useful these days. “People can go in and invite speakers to come in and speak on various topics,” Kern says.

Regarding the Meghan Markle-Prince Harry interview, Kern thought, “It was done really well, and it was done by the right person.” But with respect to the Crown, she said they handled the situation poorly. “They should have been advocating for Megan, apologizing for how they made her feel,” Kerns says. She also explains why the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork went viral during the interview.

There’s a different sense of what’s real in the black community than what’s real in the White community, she pointed out. “It really took the murder of George Floyd to awaken people”, she emphasizes. “I have gone to HR on numerous occasions, saying that I had been mistreated, microaggressions, and I’m not an oversensitive person”. In many of those instances, she was told she was overacting. Her message to White America is that racism still festers and inhibits African Americans, particularly in the workplace. Rather than roll your eyes, “Believe black people,” she says.

Regarding the film United States vs. Billie Holiday, Kern says she enjoyed the music, but remarked that what Holiday went through is not really that surprising for her perspective. “I didn’t find her story to be unique, because when I look back at a lot of other black performers in that day, their situation is not any different.” But she said that in addition to standing her ground, she was struck by Holiday’s self-confidence in the value of her artistry. “It’s so important to know that you’re valued, and there are so many people who want to bring you down, who don’t think very much of you, but I felt in that moment, watching, that she knew what her worth was.”

To hear the full interview with this content agency professional, scroll up and use the audio player at the top of this blog post to play the podcast. And subscribe to future episodes here.

If you’d like to support this podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts here.