Ross Simmonds 14:16
Yeah, so we always talk about revenue pipeline and the importance of actually influencing those with your content marketing efforts, but we recognize that not all assets, aka pieces of content, are created equally. So if we are developing a piece of content that has the intent of driving conversion, revenue, sales pipeline, then those are certain types of pieces of content, for example, a blog post that talks about the top 10 solutions that are all within your vertical and within your space, that have you at the top, that is a highly valuable piece to rank for in Google, and we should track whether or not that moves the needle for revenue, because you are trying to go out.
After a high commercial intent query. But if we’re creating a piece of content that is the state of your industry, we don’t necessarily think in our minds that this piece is going to drive a ton of revenue, but we should be thinking this piece should generate enough backlinks, this piece should generate enough downloads and emails and buzz and maybe organic traffic that over time, this piece is going to show ROI through pipeline generation, through leads, through a touch point, things like that. So not every asset can be treated equally. I believe there’s value in sharing a meme on social media, right? I would say with highly confidence, not a lot of memes drive sales, but those memes can drive a, like can drive a follow, a connection, a subscribe, which leads to down the road that transaction when they see that you just launched a new feature that is relevant to your product.
So long story a little bit longer. Yes, we have these conversations about vanity metrics all the time, but now more than ever, amidst a commoditization of software where almost anyone can put together a couple of $1,000 and create an MVP for a product, a minimum viable product, it is so important for organizations to actually start thinking like we used to think about marketing, aka brand. Brand is now more important than it ever was. Yes, it’s super important to focus on conversions. It’s super important to think about LTV and CAC and all of those things, demand Gen, all of those things are super important, but brand makes all of those things easier today. So as much as it’s vanity metrics, I think those vanity metrics are leading indicators to revenue down the road.
Jeremy Weisz 16:52
So what are some of the different purposes of content? You mentioned a few, which is, there could be content for high commercial intent, there could be content for getting backlinks, because it’s a more of a broad piece. Maybe it’s a meme. What are the other purposes of content that you kind of walk your clients through?
Ross Simmonds 17:12
Yeah. So there’s a few different pieces. And if you go to foundationinc.co, right on our homepage, we have this idea of what we call a content portfolio. And a content portfolio is kind of like your stock portfolio or your investment portfolio. Every organization is going to invest differently, and the way that you invest is going to be different from me, the same way that a company that is in one space will invest differently from another. So for example, when we think of the content investment. There’s things like social content. That is the stories that you tell on social media to engage and connect with your customers. We think about thought leadership content.
This is content that is really important for early stage companies who want to accelerate their growth and stand out amongst the noise. There’s also things like high growth SEO content. So what is high growth SEO content? It’s content that is demonstrating that there is a rapid increase happening month over month in the amount of people going to Google, going to Bing, going to YouTube looking for these keywords. So for example, if you rewind back, let’s say, 12 months ago, and you created a landing page on what is generative AI, that would have been considered a high growth topic, because in the months to follow, it was going to skyrocket. The same can be said for some of the newer cryptocurrencies and things like that. Those are high growth opportunities.
Are they risky to invest in? 100%, you don’t know if it’s going to go to the moon as it relates to that keyword, or if it’s going to plummet and nobody’s going to look for it again. We’ve all seen trends where something is hot today and then quiet tomorrow. That’d be the growth SEO. Yeah, that’s the growth SEO idea. It’s like, go after those keywords that are on their way to take off. But there’s also the flip side of that, whereas more it’s not about high growth, you’re just trying to maintain. So the number of people who go to Google today and they type in what is a CRM is relatively flat. It’s been relatively flat for years. This is what we call validated SEO.
We know that every single month a certain number of people are going to type that into Google, and we’re just trying to compete against the others in the SERP. Now, the other type that is interesting is backlink content.
Jeremy Weisz 17:12
I love this, let me just interrupt you for a quick second. I love this, I’m just, I want to point people to the video part too, because as Ross is talking, we are looking through this, and I’m fine. I’m very conservative, right? Based on your model here, yeah? Like, you can click through and there’s conservative growth and all the way to exponential growth. And so, like, it’s interesting, because you say validate. I’m like, Yeah, give me the validated. I’m like, oh, wait, the exponentials 10% and the growth is 30%. And this is obviously more. Are less conservative, more growth focused. I’m like, no, and I’m like, okay, I’m number one. I’m like, give me 50% validated. It’s already driven. So you get some insight in your personality with this.
Ross Simmonds 20:12
100%, and on the question mark on there, it gives you a deeper breakdown of all of the different portfolios and how it works. There’s a conservative growth model. There’s an exponential, moderate, balanced, et cetera. And one of the types is also backlink related. So if you want to rank in Google, then you care about how many people are linking to you, or how much press is linking to you, et cetera. And then the other piece of content that you can invest in, that a lot of brands don’t think about often is culture content. So if you’re on a hiring spree, you probably want to create content that showcases your culture, showcases the way that you think, the way that your organization is run.
Maybe you’re creating pieces that talk about whether or not you’re in-office, hybrid, or remote. Maybe you talk about your perspective on async communication versus synchronous communication. Vacation policies, whatever it might be that’s culture content, or you celebrate your people. Did you just make an amazing hire? Create a piece of content about it, right? So that is the way that we think about content. We think about it like an investment, and we believe organizations should too.
Jeremy Weisz 21:16
This could be linked to like a personality test, like which one you are.
Ross Simmonds 21:22
I think I’m going to take you up on that and probably try to create one like that.
Jeremy Weisz 21:25
I’m like, if you’re a conservative, here’s you.
Ross Simmonds 21:28
Exactly. I think it’s…
Jeremy Weisz 21:30
For some reason I gravitated towards that one when you’re talking.
Ross Simmonds 21:34
I love it. I think I’m going to take this as a takeaway that we should create a bit of a quiz on our site to do that, and I’ll flip you a line as soon as it’s live.
Jeremy Weisz 21:43
Nice. So I know we also mentioned Canva too. So talk about Canva and some of the things you did with them, and some of the things they do from a content perspective, because they are actually help people create content, which is interesting.
Ross Simmonds 21:58
Yeah, one of my favorite companies of all time. I think their team is amazing, lots of brilliant minds over there, and we had the privilege of being able to work with them. We had the opportunity to do both the content creation and content distribution, and the whole team over there. It’s just absolute brilliant minds. We wrote a piece probably five years ago now, but it’s still one of our most highly trafficked pieces, and it breaks down how Canva was able to structure their site with brilliance, and how they were able to acquire backlinks with brilliance.
And from that, a lot of brands have been able to learn and see how they were able to grow. And it’s through things like organic outreach, finding brands and businesses and media companies that have content about a certain topic, reaching out to them, sending them an email and then going out and trying to get a link to your site, but they also understand that, I think is something that should actually be studied in schools, is the importance of search intent. So in all of their content, it was structured with search intent at the forefront, and we shared this graphic in our piece that showed all of the different types of intent that a user can have. That piece has actually gone on to be like brought into textbooks in universities all throughout the US. I’ve gotten emails from professors who have used it as like material in their classrooms. But intent is a very underrated concept, and it’s the reason why someone goes to search. So some people go to search and they’re trying to figure out informational content. So informational content would be someone typing in what is a good card building tool, or what is a CRM or what are the best podcast to listen to?
When you go to Google and you type that in, your intent is to get information. But for some people, their intention is by like they’re literally typing into Google buy business cards, or they’re typing in buy a CRM or the best CRMs for me, like you need to understand the intention behind why someone is doing things, and they understood that really well early on, and that helped them scale and grow their business. Long story again, a little bit longer. When I think about intent, I think so many people underestimate the value of understanding that concept, because the information that you get is oftentimes based off of the words that you put in to Google and a customer who’s typing in, let’s say best podcast software is very different than somebody who’s typing in cheap podcast software. But oftentimes we think that they’re the same person.
So what you have to realize is those are two completely different people with two different motives. One person might have a budget of $50 million that’s the person going after best, while someone might have $50 of a budget that’s the person going after cheap. And if you don’t understand those differences, you might create the exact same blog post and think that you can go after it, but you have to understand the search intent behind the people that you’re trying to connect with, and they did this extremely well. They have multiple landing pages that go after things like informational intent, navigational intent, transactional intent, investigational intent, and by doing so, they were able to create what I would call an SEO moat. And an SEO moat is when you have built so much equity in Google and on your website that it is close to impossible for competitors to come in and take some of your market share within the SERP.
Jeremy Weisz 25:43
So this one we’re looking at here, Ross, this is a breakdown of that, the Canva backlink empire. And it talks about some of the, is this the piece of content here that that?
Ross Simmonds 25:56
Yeah. So you can see here some of their different assets that they’ve created that kind of speak to certificate templates. So the only people who would go to Google and type in certificate templates are people looking for certificate templates, obviously, but they also recognize that there’s another type of person, someone who might be looking to learn how to design a certificate, so that’s a different type of query. So they created content that went after people who might be trying to design something versus create something, recognizing that those two words, while they are similar, are actually very different, and you have to align your content around that search query at large.
Jeremy Weisz 26:39
I’m wondering about you mentioned that top 10 post before. I mean, it could be any top 10 post. Are there any favorites? Like, when you think of top 10, and it always, I always think, when I see a top 10, I’m like, are they displaying all of their competitors in the same post? I’m sure maybe, I don’t know, if you get pushback from clients on a put a post where, yes, I’m at the top, like, then I list all my competitors that people can search on. I don’t know. What’s your mentality around that? And maybe we pull up an example, one of your favorites, maybe that you helped create.
Ross Simmonds 27:17
Yeah, this happens all the time. And I get it. I get why people are afraid of it. But if you go to Google right now, and you just type in top content marketing agencies, there’s going to be a ton of agents, content marketing agencies that wrote this blog post, and they have a bunch of landing pages where they’re talking about their competitors. Now you might think, why would they do that? They’re going to give away their competitors names, and they’re going to do like, this is not a good idea, but they always put themselves as number one.
So by putting themselves as number one, they are owning the SERP for that query. So when you do that, you increase your likelihood of being able to drive traffic to yourself. Now, here’s a little hack that a lot of brands have started to do. And I think Zapier does this really well. They talk about competitors who are non-competitors. So oftentimes, a SaaS company will talk about, ClickUp does this extremely well also. A company will talk about their top three project management software solutions, and the number two isn’t actually their direct competitor. It’s Google Sheets. And they’ll say Google Sheets because they know that, yes, Google Sheets is able to be used, but you’re not looking for Google Sheets when you’re looking for the best software to do project management.
Oh, what’s number three? Excel. Oh, okay, so now you have Excel listed as the third ones. So again, it’s very difficult for you to say, like you’re gonna use this tool instead of Excel. So as you look at this SERP, and I’m gonna talk through kind of my thing.
Jeremy Weisz 28:58
I put in top CRMs for SaaS here, and there’s a bunch of sponsored ones here, but like smith.ai is one.
Ross Simmonds 29:07
Right? And ClickUp, like I mentioned, is number two, right? So ClickUp is there. And you can see that they included themselves number one, which is brilliant, right? Like they included themselves as the number one SaaS CRM, and for all intents and purposes, it’s like usually that would be a Salesforce, that would be a HubSpot. Those would be proper pure play. Then they have Zendesk cell. Zendesk cell would never show up in like a common, typical dialog around SaaS CRM, but they’re now showing up as number two. So they’re moving through Pipedrive. Then they get to Salesforce. They never mentioned HubSpot, which is very surprising to me. So they remove, arguably one of their top competitors from this, SERP.
Jeremy Weisz 29:13
And these are maybe more enterprise too, Oracle, so maybe a lot of people looking for ClickUp aren’t as enterprise possibly, I don’t know.
Ross Simmonds 30:02
Right, 100% and here’s where it gets even more interesting. Now, with the rise of things like chatgpt, everyone is thinking, oh, okay, but nobody goes to Google anymore. SEO is like ruining it. If you opened up ChatGPT and you asked it, “hey, can you do some research for me and find the top CRMs for SaaS.” It’s probably going to find this article or the other one that was ranking number one, and it’s going to interpret those as being the best CRMs for SaaS, and it’s going to give you that answer. So a lot of people are screaming at the top of their lungs that SEO is dead. SEO is dead. Everybody’s going to generative AI to get the answers to their questions. But in reality, these AIs are using SEO optimized content to influence the answers that they give you. So by ensuring that the content that you create is optimized for search, you’re doing a double whammy, where you’re supporting your optimization for generative AI just the same.
Jeremy Weisz 31:02
Yeah, no, I love that. And here is like you were saying, actually, Ross is the Smith.AI does have HubSpot listed on here in Salesforce and close. And actually, it’s funny thing is, ClickUp is not listed on this one, right? Yeah. I guess you use ClickUp for anything, but I view it as more of a project management tool. But people do use a CRM, I guess. This is super interesting. The other thing Ross I had a question about is your team, and building a team and culture, because you’ve been doing this for a long time. Talk about the evolution of the positions you had to hire for from the beginning because you in college, yeah, doing a fantasy football blog to now, right?
Ross Simmonds 31:59
Yeah, when I first got started, it was just myself for many years, and all invoices came from rossimmonds.com It was branded as rossimmonds.com and then eventually we started to kind of grow up, and we made Foundation, the name of the company, and it was, and when I say we, I mean me, but I eventually got to a point where I needed to bring in some help and some support, because the late nights were just like killing me. So I put up a job posting. I hired a intern, fresh out of school, brought them in and seen very quickly the impact that that had on my quality of life. And I was like, okay, I need to bring on another person.
So I hired again, and at this point I focused exclusively on being remote from the beginning. So even though they were in Halifax, we were all fully remote. And then over time, I continued to bring on more and more people. In my traditional agency world, I worked with someone named Melissa Hughes, who’s now our COO and I remember going out for coffee with her and pitching, hey, Mel, I’m working with these brands, I’m doing all of this stuff. Would you be interested in joining my team? And she was, at first, like, not really sold on it, but we talked through she started to see, like, the clients that we were working with, the opportunity in front of us, and she joined the team, and that was a big trajectory changer for Foundation, because it gave us the ability to really kind of grow up that extra level to be a professional company. You fast forward now we have Foundationites all over the world, Foundationites who have contributed greatly to the culture, both past and present.
And our team today is just one that I’m extremely proud of, extremely excited about and it’s very cool to know that our team is spread all over. We have folks that are in Ontario. We have folks that are in the UK. We brought in James Sheriff, who is a brilliant mind in content production and developing content strategies that are rooted in SEO at high volume. And James has been amazing. Jessica Everett, who is a Nova Scotian. I didn’t know that she was Nova Scotian at first, and then realized that she was, but she has an amazing career where she’s helped brands like monday.com scale their content production company up into the right and then beyond that, we’ve got so many bright minds from top to bottom within Foundation, creating amazing distribution playbooks, geeking out about AI. We’ve got writers like Ethan Crump who produces some of the best breakdowns, I believe, on the internet, around SaaS and companies like that. It’s a great team, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
Jeremy Weisz 34:39
One of the questions, and you kind of hit on it with AI and SparkToro is, I’m curious your favorite tech tools? Your favorite software?
Ross Simmonds 34:49
Yeah, I’m gonna geek out on you for a bit. So I’m a big fan. I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole where a lot of people might not be today, but I’m gonna talk about AI tools that I love. So the first one is 11 Labs. 11 Labs is a audio AI tool that if you have a podcast like me, I have a podcast called Create Like The Greats, where I talk about business and things like that. Check it out. You can download all of your episodes and upload your voice to this AI, and it will listen to you and it will try to create a synthetic version of your voice. I’ve done this, and it’s very difficult for people to be able to pick up the fact that that’s not actually me. It doesn’t get the abodes right. But outside of that, it’s like, very well, I don’t have that problem. Yeah, exactly. You won’t have that problem. But outside of that, it’s really, really good. And when I think of this technology, what I think of is the future of podcasting, and how people will be able to use AI tools to create a lot of their podcast content, and how audio books will no longer.
Jeremy Weisz 35:47
That’s exactly what I was thinking about.
Ross Simmonds 35:49
It’s a ridiculous labor of love where you have to spend hundreds of hours recording, you can just upload your audio voice and it will take care of it.
Jeremy Weisz 35:56
So for your books, and I’d love for you to just talk the titles. I want to go down the tech, but you mentioned because that’s immediately the use case I thought of as, like, oh my god, I have to spend like 10 hours reading my book and make it audio. And you’re like, upload it. And again, I don’t know the quality now, but if it saves me like 30 hours of prepping and re-recording. What are some of the names of your books so people can check them out?
Ross Simmonds 36:27
Yeah. So my first book ever was written way back in the day, called Hustle Manifesto, where I talk about how to escape the nine to five to create your own business. Since then, though, my most recent book, which I’m really excited about is Create Once, Distribute Forever. So this will be my first book that’s fully available on Amazon, et cetera, all that good stuff, publishers, all of that good deal. And it’s going to help brands, businesses and creators understand the importance of distributing the things that they invest in. And what I’m talking about there is, every single day, brands are investing in creating content, creating a podcast, creating an eBook, creating a white paper, creating a blog post.
And over years, over time, we’ve gotten into this habit of just creating, creating, creating, and not pausing and then spreading those stories. And I believe truly that some of the best content, some of the best ideas, probably even some of the best journals that would have impacted culture and history, and probably even, like just good old fashioned articles and podcasts will never get the amount of reach that they deserve, because the person who created it didn’t know how to promote that idea. And my goal with this book is to get this in front of all of the people who have imposter syndrome around, oh, I can’t share this. I don’t want to be that guy on social to realize, yes, you should share it. If you invest 20 hours to create something, you are doing a disservice to yourself to only spend 20 seconds promoting it. You need to share your content. You need to promote your content.
And this doesn’t just apply to marketing. This is internal. If you are doing a great job, distribute that amongst your team so they know how good you are doing. We are so, so, so quiet about the work that we invest in creating, and we need to shift it on its head and stop spending 80% of our time creating and 20% distributing. We need to flip those and have 20% creating and 80% promoting it.
Jeremy Weisz 38:29
So thanks for sharing that, Ross. So let’s go back, because I don’t interrupt. I love the flow. Tools, so you were talking about 11 Labs. What else do you like?
Ross Simmonds 38:39
Mid Journey is another tool that I’ve been geeking out with quite a bit. So Mid Journey is an AI tool that allows you to imagine practically any visual that you can think of. So you go into Mid Journey and you get to use, it’s all run through discord, which I think is the one thing that is holding it back from ridiculous scale and growth. But it’s in discord, and you have to type in backslash, imagine, and then you describe a scene, a picture, a visual, kind of like Dally-E, which is owned by chatgpt, if you’re not familiar with it, but you can just allow it to create anything.
If you wanted to create and design a new T shirt, a new coffee mug, a new logo, a website, you can ask it to do these things, or even a photo and a picture of someone with a child, someone with a Chihuahua, someone with a Yorkie, with a Yorkie and a Chihuahua, like you can create anything. And that tool, in my opinion, is game changing for the creative scene, and I play with that a lot. And this last one that I’ll share is a tool called HeyGen. And what I love about HeyGen is that it is essentially a deep fake for professionals. So right now you can go in and it has an integration with 11 Labs, but it also does video AI, so I can upload a video of myself talking into the camera, just like I’m doing right now, and within the matter of a few minutes, it will sync my lips to that 11 Labs video, and it will create a deepfake of me where I can upload the text, and it will say anything that I wanted to say. But here’s where it gets very interesting.
They have a labs section of their tool where it allows you to tinker with some new innovations that they have. And one of the features is called Personalized AI. And with Personalized AI, I’m able to record a video, and I could say, Hey, Jeremy, I hope you’re doing well. And then I can go into the text and I can tell it that where it said Jeremy. I wanted to change to Jack. I wanted to change to Alice. I wanted to change to James, to Frank, to Ricky, to all of these different names that are in my CRM, and then send an automated video to all of these people with fake personalization. We live in the future like it’s wild out here.
Jeremy Weisz 41:02
I think you should have your next book should be deep fake. I don’t know if someone has that title deep fake, and then some subtitle and like, I don’t know. You know, the tough part about those, like, tools change and their software changes, but I like that, you got me. I’ll buy it to come out with deep fake. And we mentioned a couple others, like, there’s Canva, there’s Unbounce. What other tools that you do as a company? I don’t know if there’s project management tools or CRMs. What do you like?
Ross Simmonds 41:37
Yeah, so we’ve talked about a lot of them. We’re big fans of Canva. We’re big fans of ClickUp. We’ve run a lot on Slack. We’re fully remote, so we use that. We’ve been using Zoom and their AI functionality lately as well, and we think that that is a great technology that we’ve been leveraging, and we get a lot of value out of we’ve tried a lot of the different sales tools that plug into your zoom calls, but we find that Zoom AI, since it’s now integrated directly into the platform, is just great to use, and we get a lot of value out of that. There’s a small tool that a lot of you probably view it as, like a redditor tool, but it’s actually very valuable as well, which is called Giphy.
So Giphy has a downloadable app that you can put onto your computer, and you can, like, create GIFs on your computer, which is ridiculously valuable for developing SOPs, developing instruction manuals and things like that. And then the last one that I’ll mention is Loom. So I’m a huge fan of asynchronous communication, where I want to be able to send my team videos that they can watch at a time where it doesn’t interrupt their flow. So my team is out creating or building or launching or selling or on a call with a client. I don’t want to disrupt them and say, get on a call. Let’s talk right away. I can send them a Loom, which is a prerecorded video where I share my screen, and they can watch it and consume that content at a time that is convenient for them.
Before Foundation was even like started to hire, there was another tool called Soapbox. It’s essentially Loom, and I recorded probably 20 hours of videos talking through my processes on how I do things. And now, when Foundationites join, they have access to a set of library material where they can watch these videos to learn what the Foundation way looks like, so they’re not stuck trying to figure it out. Oh, there’s a video I can watch this, and it will talk me through how to deal with this situation, how to manage this, how to use this tool, all of those things.
Jeremy Weisz 43:37
I’m not going to show this episode Ross with my business partner, John Corcoran, because he’ll spend the whole day on Giphy. What you just talked about, I like to tell him not to do it sidetracked, because he lost his creating these. There was one, there was an email we’d send, when maybe the communication got broken, like, maybe we dropped the ball, and he sent, like, Chris something like a kangaroo, like, dropping a big like,
Ross Simmonds 44:00
I love it.
Jeremy Weisz 44:01
He’ll spend all day. Well, I’m gonna really, from like, a, you know, a follow up perspective and emails even.
Ross Simmonds 44:07
That’s awesome. Well, here’s one more that I’ll share with just for that. It’s called GIFJIF, and what you’re able to do with this one is any GIF that you can imagine, you can swap the face with your own face and send a gift with yourself on it. And it’s a great way to build company culture. It’s a great way to get a response from a client who hasn’t responded in a while. I love that one as well.
Jeremy Weisz 44:32
Last question, Ross, first of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, your journey, your lessons. Everyone can check out foundationinc.co, to learn more. Last question is, why do you want to be a WWF wrestler?
Ross Simmonds 44:50
Yeah, exactly so me and my dad spent a ton of time watching wrestling from the time I was a kid, and I just always loved watching these wrestlers just like, be bigger than life. They would come down, they’d stand in the ring, the crowd would go crazy, the crowd would go wild, and they just had all of this energy. And the Rock was one of my, like, favorite of all time. And I used to run around and tell people, do you smell what the Ross is cooking and…
Jeremy Weisz 45:21
What’s wrong with you?
Ross Simmonds 45:22
Yeah, exactly.
Jeremy Weisz 45:23
Already heard of the rock. That’s like a weird statement to say.
Ross Simmonds 45:27
100% so I was just a big wrestling geek as a kid, and me and my dad loved it, and I wanted to be a wrestler because of it.
Jeremy Weisz 45:35
Who were other favorites?
Ross Simmonds 45:37
123 kid was now, then he became X Pac and six and a bunch of those guys. Ahmed Johnson, which is a old throwback, but I loved watching him. And then the usuals, Bret Hart as a Canadian, every Canadian loved Bret Hart, and the whole Hart family. And then Bob Backlund. I’m getting really niche and geeky, so I don’t know if anybody’s going to know who that is, but he was hilarious and a great wrestler as well.
Jeremy Weisz 46:06
I had on the podcast Colt Cabana, who had, I think, I don’t know if the longest standing wrestler part podcast, it’s morphed into a couple of versions, but it was called The Art of Wrestling, and he had all the greats on and all the, like you said, the niche, right people as well. So people can check that out. And we talked some wrestling on that episode. Colt Cabana, yeah, he’s got various content out there, so people can check it out. But Ross, thank you so much. Everyone, check out foundationinc.co, more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Ross, thanks so much.
Ross Simmonds 46:46
Thank you for having me.
