1266 – Doing Outreach Right with Respona’s Farzad Rashidi

07/25/22 • 22 min

In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge speaks with the Lead Innovator and Co-Founder of Respona, Farzad Rashidi.

Respona is a platform that helps businesses create partnerships with publications in their sector to gain editorial backlinks to their website. It also helps with gaining organic traffic from Google. A tool that is heavily focused on helps clients identify targets, gives the clients contact information for the target, and outreach for the clients. Farzad explains that there is a lot of malpractice in the space of building backlinks. This malpractice happens because individuals are trying to figure out what works with creating these backlinks.

Respona has around 2,000 users that use Respona in very different ways. Farzad explains that they used Respona to recruit affiliate partners through a strategy such as competitor backlink analysis. They would pull the top performing affiliates and use the software to find the main person from those affiliate companies to get into contact. It further helps to create a pitch to give to these companies and possibly create a relationship. There is a program called Respona Guru that is an established relationship with freelancers or agencies and clients can hire these individuals to delegate the process to them.

Farzad explains that you can use Respona to find the right podcast to go on for your business. You can use a keyword search or search a specific person's name relevant to your business sector to find a podcast that could be willing to accept guests, the relevancy in your space, and makes the pitching process easier for the client. Farzad explains that he wanted to keep pricing simple for Respona. The cost is starting from $99 a month that is billed monthly and can be canceled at any time. It comes with a free onboarding session and 30 day guarantee. The session includes a meeting with their success team to go over the clients priorities to tour the software and provide a personalized campaign.

Farzad explains that Google used page rank to determine popularity. This is a process of the higher the page rank, the higher the amount of quality backlinks are used in regard to that website. Respona spend 20% of their resources on content creation and the other 80% of resources on promotion and outreach to receive backing from other relevant publications. Farzad says there are not many companies that focus on the outreach side of business and it makes it a unique software company. Farzad explains that he wrote about his success with his parent company Visme in his free ebook Marketing Strategies We Used to Bootstrap Visme to over 4 Million users. There is a Respona outreach strategy hub on the website to help ease potential clients into the space and get them comfortable before fully signing up for the software.

Want to learn more? Check out the Respona website at https://respona.com/.

Check out Respona on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/respona/.

Check out Farzad Rashidi on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/farzadrashidi/.

Check out Farzad Rashidi on Twitter at https://twitter.com/The_Farzad.

Check out Farzad Rashidi’s free ebook Marketing Strategies We Used to Bootstrap Visme to over 4 Million users at https://www.visme.co/marketing-strategy/.

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur and thank you for listening. Tune in next time!

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1267 – Get Your Business Out of Your Brain with Trainual’s Chris Ronzio

In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge, speaks with the CEO of Trainual, Chris Ronzio.

Josh and Chris discuss the mission of Trainual which is a business playbook training manual for businesses. Chris talks about history, vision, values, asking why, co-workers, and the rules that are established within businesses. Josh asks Chris if in a perfect world, what would the on boarding process look like? Chris discusses the importance of the formal signing of an offer and the importance of announcing a new member within a company. He discusses the impact of setting up new employees with technology so they have the tools necessary to perform. He also shares the importance of providing space as a new employee is learning their new bearings.

Josh asks Chris about the friction that comes when considering adaptations within processes. Chris talks about the different reasons to come into a system like Trainual. First, is to make sure everything is centralized. Next, Chris discusses accountability. Lastly, is the search or ease of finding things when reaching for company resources.

Josh asks Chris how Trainual takes something like a manual which is usually perceived as boring and elevates it. Chris discusses how interactive Trainual is versatile, it can include embedded videos, gifts, questions, slides, Spotify playlists. He emphasizes that anything that enriches the culture of your company can be uploaded to the system and the tools are there so it doesn’t have to be boring.

Chris talks about one of Trainual’s favorite trademarks, “get your business out of your brain.” He shares how we often feel like the burden of running a company is on our shoulders and how we get stuck in our heads. Chris explains that the transformation doesn’t have to be all at once and the importance of empowering other people within a company.

Josh asks what sort of agencies Trainual works with and how these agencies would use Trainual. Chris shares that Trainual is a very horizontal tool. How any business that has people as a component of delivering the product or service being offered can benefit from this system. He discusses how when you have people, then you care a lot about consistency, and to have consistency it’s important to document the company's best practices. They then discuss the value of documenting and collaborating practices within a company and how a process people group can impact that consistency. Chris talks about his book, The Business Playbook, that breaks down how to do this to disconnect from the day to day so that companies are free to grow their business.

Want to learn more? Check out Trainual’s website at https://trainual.com

Check out Trainual on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/trainual/

Check out Chris Ronzio on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisronzio/

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur and thank you for listening. Tune in next time!