Dux Soup is a very nice tool at a very nice price point, $15/month, and you can use some of the features for free. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am seeing greatly increased interest via LinkedIn. Fundamentally, it is a tool that will visit profiles on LinkedIn for you, based on a LinkedIn search, a LinkedIn group’s member list, a custom list of profiles you already have, or a Google search. You may want to just have it visit (to get folks to view your profile back) or you can set it to automatically follow, automatically invite to connect (with a custom message if you like), or for existing contacts you can send a message or endorse skills. It’s a Chrome extension and you need to remember to run it daily or keep a tab open for it, but other than that is mostly automatic.

This one is like a big brother to Dux Soup, a lot more expensive but also it seems significantly more capable. I haven’t used it yet but have watched a couple of videos and received a demo. It does all of the same things, as well as many more such as automatically congratulating folks for new positions or birthdays, automatically doing an initial response, automatically accepting invites and so forth, as well as doing message campaigns on your existing contacts for example to do a promotion. The last neat thing is that ConnectDingo does everything the same way a human does, typing responses one character at a time, moving the mouse, and so forth, so it seems less likely LinkedIn will ban you.

Brand24 gives you instant access to mentions about your brand across the web. I started a trial about a week ago. Not sure yet if it’ll be worth continuing, but it’s interesting to see where your brand is being mentioned and to track that over time. One thing I already learned from watching social media mentions of “Instant Demos” (one of the features of CrankWheel) is that the term may be significantly too overloaded. Suggestions for a better name for this feature would be appreciated! 😎

Spoke to the founder of this company the other day. Seems like a smart solution. It can auto post, auto follow, do analysis of posts, and more.

This is one of those AI website builders and seems to be quite polished, I tried throwing up a couple of different sites quickly and it was very painless.

A simple tool to generate Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords for SEO, i.e. keywords related to the keyword(s) that you’re writing a piece of content about. The theory is, it may help with SEO if you include the LSI keywords as well.

This is a free (for now at least) tool from Microsoft that uses AI to build a simple Q&A bot based on your FAQ pages, structured documents and/or editorial content.

I started a regular podcast for the CrankWheel newsletter and blog, where we interview CrankWheel users and ask them about their business, how they sell, how they drive demand, and how they use screen sharing. I won’t be posting these here, just wanted to mention them once, in particular to invite you to participate if you’re interested in spreading the word about your business. CrankWheel’s newsletter and social reach is well over 10K readers and we promote the podcast widely.

Extensive guide to what looks like it’s working in SEO now and tips on how to achieve it. TL;DR: Content and links are still king, but RankBrain also has a significant impact which means you should try to increase dwell time, for example by using embedded videos.

Really insightful (and long) piece on lessons learned selling a smallish SaaS business. Lots of advice to take to heart, also for those of us not thinking about selling.

An article that suggests you send plain-text emails, even for newsletters, along with some data showing higher click-through rates. I’ve definitely been sending plain-text outreach emails but never thought of trying it for newsletters, onboarding sequences etc. Interesting.

Ooh I really want to do some deep work now. Oh look, something shiny!! 🤓