We need to find email addresses for the launch in 2 weeks – about 400 should do.

Damn…

Nobody likes to hear that the next week of their time will be spent researching, selecting, and verifying hundreds of email addresses. It’s boring enough to make you complacent, but any mistakes are costly.

In other words, it’s one of the tedious marketing processes which we all love to hate.

After all, 400 emails are no good if they’re all blocked by spam filters.

I knew there had to be a better way than Googling the target audience, so I tested 9 email lookup tools and managed to find one with 92% accuracy.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Doyle Albee, host of PR is Dead and president of PR firm ‎Metzger Albee.

Public relations expert Doyle Albee shares his stories, tips, and processes on building a PR strategy for your business.

We chat about everything from building relationships with reporters to knowing the perfect time to strike with your story. And, the myth that ‘all news is good news’ is debunked!

Get inside the world of reporters and their motivations with these unique insights from the president of Metzger Albee PR firm, and host of the Rainmaker.fm podcast PR is Dead.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored we speak to Kate Erickson of the fantastic Entrepreneur on Fire.

Kate’s talking to us about how her content helped propel EOFire to one of the biggest podcasts ever made, and how she’s about to do it all over again with her new blog, Kate’s Take. Kate lets us in on her marketing processes for creating high quality, actionable resources and how she makes damn well sure these resources are a perfect market fit.

Use the links below to listen to the episode, or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss out.

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When we say ‘thank you’, it’s often at the end of a conversation.

In the marketing world, there’s no reason to see it that way. In fact, if you’re using your thank you page to signal the end of your customer’s path on your site, you’re doing it wrong.

First of all, let’s look at when to use thank you pages.

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Recently, we launched our first ebook, “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier”.

After searching around for tips on launching and promoting an ebook, I came up a bit short, stumbling mostly across 90s-style sales pages for trashy looking products.

So, we decided we’d have better luck coming up with our own strategy. And, of course, documenting the process so others can learn how we got the results we did.

In this post I’m going to walk you through the steps we took to launch and promote our first ebook (…a great lead magnet, by the way).

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Walter Chen — the CEO and co-founder of lightweight status reporting platform, iDoneThis.

Walter lets us in on some little-known secrets, busts a number of misleading marketing myths and shares some unexpected tactics that helped him get ahead.

The episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, you’ll learn startup marketing strategy from an experienced content marketer who — by any means necessary — pushed iDoneThis to $500k ARR. He says it’s okay for 90% of your content to fail, tell us the kinds of marketing emails you shouldn’t bother sending, and a trick he used to leverage the fanatical readership of Hacker News.

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So you’ve had this awesome game-changing consumer app idea for years, and now you’ve finally gathered the chutzpah to make your mobile app dream a reality. You’ve consulted all your friends and family and even gone as far as running it past a few people in the industry. Everyone agrees—it’s a great idea. But a lot more goes into a successful app than just an idea and the development work.

Many consumer apps of all sizes and budgets fail because they overlook key factors that directly impact the success and sustainability of their app. Here are some companies we, at Process Street, have found that did almost everything right—and failed as a result of one mistake.

Ignoring the impact of even one of these five details will prove harmful—if not fatal—to your consumer app.

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This article comes excerpted from Hiten Shah’s SaaS DNA Project: The Anatomy of a SaaS Marketing Site, a 30,000+ word research study on how users actually browse and experience SaaS marketing sites.

Hiten Shah has built products on the web for over 10 years, including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and now Quick Sprout. He breaks down everything he’s learned about building companies in his weekly email newsletter here.

When it comes to price, customers want to know two things: what they’ll pay, and what they’ll get in return. But too many SaaS companies overcomplicate their pricing pages.

Your pricing page converts traffic into customers. But that only happens if visitors instantly understand what they’ll get from each of your plans, the value it will provide, and how much it’s going to cost them. Otherwise, they’ll never sign up for your service.

In a comprehensive look at SaaS pricing pages, we studied 30 different SaaS websites through 90 different user interactions, totaling over 1,800 minutes of user testing. With help from UserTesting.com, we guided participants to each company’s pricing page and instructed them to read through the plans the company offered.

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Just over a week ago (after about a year of lurking) I decided to give Medium a shot.

There are a lot of guides out there on how to use Medium, but personally, I need to try something myself to fully understand it.

Medium seemed like an obvious choice for a few reasons:

• Medium is a Twitter product. Any Twitter followers you have that use Medium count as Medium followers and are emailed when you publish.
• I have a lot of re-publishable content that already proved itself popular on TechCrunch and The Next Web.
• There’s a huge, excited audience for what I write about on Medium.
• Republishing and promoting takes very little time — 99% of the work is already done by the time you start.

A lot of bloggers warn against setting up your home base on Medium, and they’re right.

You want your main site to be something you can manipulate, and Medium is not one of those places. It is, however, an additional promotion channel. See here for the results I got:

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When you’re planning blog posts, it can be hard to keep coming up with good ideas, let alone a good title.

Sure, you have a couple in the pipeline, and some other topics you’re itching to write about. But looking at the calendar a couple months down the line, you’re coming up blank. How is it that some places churn out insightful and well-written content every Wednesday at noon?

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