[SaaS Series] Link Building Simplified With Farzad Rashidi, Co-Founder of Respona

Farzad Rashidi is a Co-founder of Respona, a link-building outreach platform that helps businesses increase organic traffic from Google. He previously ran the marketing efforts at Visme as Director of Marketing, where he helped the company gain over 16 million active users and 3 million monthly organic traffic. He graduated from Truman State University with a Bachelor of Business Administration.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Farzad Rashidi talks about the misconceptions around SEO and link building
• Outreach tactics to consider for your business.
• How to get backlinks through podcasts
• Successful strategies for growing organic traffic
• Understanding Respona as a tool for link building
• The types of content that are effective for SEO
• Different companies Farzad learns from
• Why Respona is set at its price point

In this episode…

Link building for SEO is not an easy task. Although tools like Respona simplify the outreach process, there’s more to link-building than outreach. There’s the overlooked strategy component to determine if SEO is the best acquisition channel for your business. There is also the on and off-page SEO strategies that brands should consider.

You need to get your keyword research, page speed, content, and more dialed in for on-page SEO. But that’s only a few pieces of the puzzle. Unfortunately, many brands drop off when they don’t get immediate results after spending resources for on-page SEO. The real difference maker is link-building. Want to find out more about link-building and how to leverage it?

Listen to this Inspired Insider Podcast episode with Dr. Jeremy Weisz, featuring the Co-founder of Respona, Farzad Rashidi. They discuss outreach tactics for your business, strategies for growing organic traffic, types of content to create, and more!

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Respona
• Farzad Rashidi on LinkedIn
• Vlad Orlov on LinkedIn

Special Mentions:

• HARO
• Marketing Tips and Insights from Eugene Levin Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer at SEMrush

Books Mentioned:

• Marketing Strategies We Used to Bootstrap Visme to 4M users

Related Episode(s): 

• Wistia: Should you act like a big company or be honest with your customers when you are still small? with Chris Savage [Big Lessons Big Mistakes]
• Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]
• Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier
• From Startup to Multi-Million Dollar Company with Zvi Band, Founder of Contactually.com

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz 0:19

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of Inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Farzad Rashidi of Respona. And I’m going to formally introduce you Farzad in a second. But before I do, I like to point out other interviews, people should check out and since this is a amazing SAS company, we’ll talk about some of the past SAS co founders that software as a service co founders we’ve had on the show. We’ve had the co founder of Wistia, Chris Savage talks about being honest to customers when they were still small. We had the co founder of Pipedrive. Urmos, he talked about actually having brain surgery getting married and moving to Estonia, to the US from Estonia to the us all on the same year. And at the time, I think Barossa they had 10,000 paying customers. Now if you look at Pipedrive his website, I think they have over 100,000 customers so they’ve grown pretty, pretty bill. Yeah, you are a cool. Co Founder of Zapier, Wade Foster and Contactually co founderZvi Band so check those episodes out. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25 at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and how do we do that? We help you run your podcast and for me, I’ve been podcasting for over a decade. And the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and profile the companies and people I most admire on this planet. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you shouldn’t. If you have questions, go to Rise25.com Email us support@Rise25com. If you have any questions myself and John, my co founder we’ve been doing it for over 10 years so we’re happy to answer. I’m excited to introduce today’s guest Farzad Rashidi is a Co-founder of Respona. And respondent is a link building outreach platform that helps businesses increase organic traffic from Google. And it’s interesting, we’re gonna poke around his website, they do some amazing and really cool things as a company as a platform and just their smart business people in general. So he previously ran the marketing efforts, Visme which they helped he helped the company actually gain over 16 million active users and past 3 million monthly organic traffic. And Farzad, thanks for joining

Farzad Rashidi 2:42

Thank you so much for having me, Jeremy. It’s a pleasure.

Jeremy Weisz 2:45

So in your words, with respond, you know, I mentioned it’s a lick link building outreach platform. I know, there’s a lot of misconceptions, misconceptions around SEO and link building. So what do you see out there is, is the MISC, some of the misconceptions.

Farzad Rashidi 3:03

Sure. So you know, German, when we think of SEO as a customer acquisition strategy, a lot of people think of writing blog posts, right? So you do some keyword research, you build some pillar pages, or landing pages and some supporting content, you start planning your website, put it out there, wait a few months here, like, okay, it’s crickets. And so you move on to other things like paid ads, or cold outreach for sales, right? which each have, obviously their own pros and cons. What’s really been kind of the driving factor, I would say, for a lot of SEO campaigns, especially now that it’s become very competitive to get rankings for some of the more common keywords and especially more in some industries more than others is, is a matter of backlinks. And it’s basically, the way Google works is kind of a Mean Girls popularity contest. The more other relevant authority sources are talking about you and and linking back to your website. At Google outer searches, they’re like, Oh, these guys must be credible, because other people are talking about them. So if Jeremy’s talking about response, then other people should too. So they basically start prior to prioritizing you in a queue. And as well, it’s been really the driving factor behind a lot of successes we’ve seen in our SEO campaigns, and it’s been one of the most important ranking factors for over 20 years. So unfortunately, though, since it’s somewhat new, especially in the SEO world, there’s been a lot of spam going on, where basically people just think of link building, I’m sure you get these emails every day. I was like, Hi, I’d like to publish a guest post on your website. And I get three of those a day. That’s right, or I have high quality links if you want to buy them, right. And so that’s unfortunately being that that image has been portrayed, kind of like I would think of think of it as like early 2000s, called emails for sales, right? So like, basically, hey, if you sign up today, they’ll give you a $50 gift card or discount. So this is similar concept. I think it’s an industry that’s still evolving. And people marketers are still trying to figure it out and understand how to make it work. And yeah, then responded to platform that kind of helps us facilitate at building those relationships, kind of staying away from having to spam a bunch of websites in order to build high authority backlinks.

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