Matt Edmundson: Well, hello and welcome to the Ecommerce Podcast
with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. 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 at ecommercepodcast.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 media, either on Instagram or on LinkedIn
in just drop me a line, let's 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 Farzad. I mean you can't get
much bigger, can you? You just can't. 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 Foz. 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: I'm doing very well. Thank you so much for having
me.
Matt Edmundson: 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: They're actually. They're just past 30. I think
that number is a little outdated, but, yes,
they're doing well. Right.
Matt Edmundson: Wow. Wow. That's incredible. So tell me a little
bit about Respona. What's going on there?
Farzad Rashidi: 100%. So Respona, 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, Respona 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 you get more product
placements. Get other websites to link back to
your website, per se.
Matt Edmundson: 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: That's right, yes, absolutely. So one of our
cousins actually was. Yeah, yes. So you found
your podcast through Respona and 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: Yeah. Yeah. So Alex was on the show a couple of
months ago. Alex Beck from couch.com.
Farzad Rashidi: That'S right.
Matt Edmundson: 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: Amazing.
Matt Edmundson: But, yeah, amazing.
Farzad Rashidi: I didn't know it was released yet, so I'll
definitely check it out.
Matt Edmundson: Well, that's a good point. I'm assuming it's been
released. I definitely did the conversation a
couple of weeks ago and A couple of weeks. A
couple of months ago, 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: Okay, great. Yeah, yeah.
Matt Edmundson: 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 reason why we're talking about it.
Explain to me why you thought this was a good
idea.
Farzad Rashidi: 100%. So we've, we onboard, obviously I'm still
involved with our customer onboardings. Every
single customer comes on board, I have a
conversation with them. And recently a lot of the
conversations were sent 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 instead, 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 background.
It's like, hey, I'm a beginner, but 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 you 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: 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 use Facebook
Marketplace and got a really good price. Anyway,
I love the bike, I genuinely do. I think it's
great. But you obviously sweat a lot. So 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. But Perplexity is powered by
ChatGPT. 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. So 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. Too many
options. 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 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: Yeah.
Matt Edmundson: 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? Blah, 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: 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. To LLMs, it's
that tech, 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 results 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: How we say perplexity?
Farzad Rashidi: Exactly. Yes. I wonder if their founder can say
Perplexity like five times. Like.
Matt Edmundson: I'll get on the show and find out.
Farzad Rashidi: There's a chat 100%. Right. Anyways, so they're
actually working on a new product, OpenAI, called
Search GPT, which is essentially similar to
Perplexity. So where you can actually see the
search result and the answers are cited so you
can go and actually explore more. Which has been
sort of incorporated into ChatGPT, but since you
can't see it as visibly, 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, the 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 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.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: And 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 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 chatbots and this
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: Right.
Farzad Rashidi: 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: 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. Right. But frequency is becoming more and
more important because this is how the AI finds
information out. 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. And that I
thought was really, really fascinating that
actually 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: 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 up, the more different websites are talking
about your brand and talking about your product.
Matt Edmundson: 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.
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah.
Matt Edmundson: Where do they start? You know, where's a good
place to begin?
Farzad Rashidi: That's an excellent question. So I actually have
some strategies that I'm happy to share. Step by
step.
Matt Edmundson: That's a beautiful thing. That's what I was
hoping you would say. So let's go through the
strategies.
Farzad Rashidi: 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: 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: Right. But when you are searching for it as in
like usually research terms like best electrolyte
brands or something like that.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah I would have put in something like best
electrolyte brands.
Farzad Rashidi: Right.
Matt Edmundson: Or something like that. Certainly that's why I
put into Perplexity. What's the best brand?
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah, exactly.
Matt Edmundson: For this, for this product.
Farzad Rashidi: Right.
Matt Edmundson: Most reputable. I think I might have said most.
Farzad Rashidi: Reputable topic 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. So what, 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 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 operation
can get them a little bit more targeted. So
that's they're more likely to be listicles than
there are other things. Right. 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: Oh, they're always going to be number one. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, Right.
Farzad Rashidi: So. Well, 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 going to 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 going to pay much attention to it. So usually
the research starts in LinkedIn, so instead of
the website itself. So once you find a 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
or 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 usually at last reserve
if you couldn't find the LinkedIn page that they
don't have any sort of presence there, then rely
on the generic 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 to 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 blog post or
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? Because please,
please don't. Not at least at the current stage
of these LLMs. So they're just going to write a
very rewarded 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 your fair share of bad cold email
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 seventy, eighty words
max. That's literally like three or four
sentences.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: 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 and long email with a list
of, you know, five benefits of 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 mentioning
something interesting I talked about in the
article would, given 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, it still puts
at that top 1% of people, 99% of people don't,
don't bother changing their templates. So
customization 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. Yeah, in Business most of the time. Right.
Not. There are exceptions, of course, but put
yourself in shoes of the recipient. That's.
You'll be surprised how many people I onboard
into respond. 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
gonna just do something for you. This is not how
the world works.
Matt Edmundson: It's funny how we know that intuitively, but we
just seem to take our br of the box and just,
just go, well, this will be fine. Surely that'll
work.
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah.
Matt Edmundson: And it's always intrigued me because you go,
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: Mm, exactly. Yeah. It's a puzzle and if you mess
on either one of them, it's just not going to
work.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: So, so, and the thing is, 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 sitting there with
their.
Matt Edmundson: That's very true. Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: 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 customized person,
personalized email. Now you might be saying, hey,
that's a lot of work. And you know, 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 market as spam. It's going to harm your
domain or reputation. So don't do that. Be nice
to people. Just hey, it's a one time follow up. I
don't hear back. Just assume you're not
interested to remain respectful of your email.
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 the 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 Listicle, you know,
they would love some monetization if they
generate some sales so you can do some revenue
share with them. So if you use share Sale 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 the least, my least favorite because
usually legitimate publications, stuff like that
aren't interested and monetary comp. But there
are sometimes some editorial fees, stuff like
that, if it's a legitimate publication, 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
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: Yeah, no, it's really great. I, I like the, 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 can figure out who
contacted them. I can do the legwork. I can go to
LinkedIn, I can figure out who it was, get their
email address and so on and so forth. I can then
reach out to them. I'm going to make an
assumption here, Farzad, 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: Yeah, absolutely. So the background is Vismoon
we're 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 we still
had to do all that manually. So we built an
internal tool to help us streamline that flow so
we 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: Fantastic. But obviously you can do this
manually. You can go figure it all out. Yeah.
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, Fuzzad, 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: 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
ecommerce. But if you get a TikTok influencer to
post something once, yes, you're going to get
some sales and then two days later it's going to
go down to zero because 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.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: 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 more valuable, not a little
bit more. A lot more valuable in the long run
compared to social influencers. So 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: 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 a 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. What your suggestion is actually
to bring that down to two.
Farzad Rashidi: 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 email 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 say
hey, it's a one time follow up. Yeah, but again,
is that gonna 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 in 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. Yeah, just
don't send five.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, no, no, not at all. But we kind of
captured it. 3. It just sort of felt right. But
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.
Farzad Rashidi: We'll.
Matt Edmundson: We'll try your strategy and if it.
Farzad Rashidi: It might make it worse. Yeah, and then you go
back.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, but we'll find out when. We will find out
from there if it makes it better. I owe you a
pint, brother. So next time you're over here,
we'll. I'll take you to the pub and we'll. I'll
pay my debt.
Farzad Rashidi: Sounds like a plan.
Matt Edmundson: Absolutely. So what's another strategy? I mean,
that's one is the listicle. Yeah. What's your
second best strategy?
Farzad Rashidi: Yeah, so another one I like to do is product
review. 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 review. Certain
type of. That's probably not the best example.
Let's say you run, you. You have a healthy
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, 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 now it's
within the same space. So if a website is writing
a review on AG1, they are most likely would be
interested in your CBD gummies too, because
within the realm of what you do, AG1 has nothing
to do with your product. Right. So we sell CBD
gummies there prowler 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. 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 They've just mentioned AG1 in
passing. Like hey, like the title article is how
to get better sleep at night. And 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.
Matt Edmundson: You get 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: Take is available publicly.
Matt Edmundson: So find me on LinkedIn. I'll send you the
details. Not from.
Farzad Rashidi: That sounds great. But anyhow. Yeah. So basically
the art 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 these Google
advancements, advanced operators that sort of
respond and builds automatically but you can
build them yourself. And that is using basically
saying. So they're trying to see if folks that
are listening how they're going to visualize
this. So there's this advanced operator called
Intext. Like Intext and then you can type in AG1.
So Indertext I mentioned AG1 but within their
text I also mentioned another keyword because
sometimes the name of a company could be like
purple.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Farzad Rashidi: 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 in tax. AG1 in tax
health supplement or whatever. Yeah. 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 side owners and then instead of buys
them and then we can get more and more into the
weeds and go into more advanced and like you say,
you.
Matt Edmundson: 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 goes on
for. But that's super clever. I like because
you're using some very simple instructions in
Google search, aren't you? In 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: Exactly.
Matt Edmundson: 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 Com 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: 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 would 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 floor customer ecommerce
store. Now as painful sound comfortable 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 that it's difficult is good.
Matt Edmundson: 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 several, 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 is 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 says, 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 did all of these links just to get them in.
And you only need a few of those and your quids
in really. But I really, 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. Far as I'd. 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: Sounds great. Brilliant.
Matt Edmundson: Okay, what's your question?
Farzad Rashidi: 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. How can E commerce stores
tweak and adjust and adapt their strategy in the
age of AI very customer promotion or customer
acquisition?
Matt Edmundson: Okay, if you want to know how I'm gonna answer
that question, come follow me on social media, on
Instagram and just look for me on LinkedIn. Matt
Edmundson it's the same thing and I will do my
level best to give a very good answer to said
question. But Farzad, 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: Absolutely. My LinkedIn is Farsad Rashidi There
aren't a ton of us out there, so fairly easy to
spot. But our website is respona.com R E S P O N
A dot com and 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: Fantastic. Fantastic. We will of course link to
Farzad'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 website at ecommercepodcast.net or of course
if you just scroll down in podcast app they will
be there as well. But Farzad, 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: Of course it's My pleasure, and thank you so much
for having me, Matt.
Matt Edmundson: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. There
you have it. What a great conversation. Huge
thanks again to Farzad for joining me today. Now,
be sure to follow the Ecommerce 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. Farzad got
to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to
bear it as well. Now, the Ecommerce Podcast is
produced by Podjunction. You can find our entire
archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.
The team that makes this show possible includes
the legend Sadaf Baynon and Josh Edmundson, 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 ecommercepodcast.net that's all
one word, ecommercepodcast.net but that's it from
me. That's it from Farzad. 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: Sa.