Hi, it's Jói. You know what that means - it's Friday! My thought for this week is: Work hard on your
|
|
November 3 · Issue #85 · View online
Get the latest tools and resources that will really help your startup.
|
|
Hi, it’s Jói. You know what that means - it’s Friday! My thought for this week is: Work hard on your startup, but more importantly work smart, and don’t let the stress build up to a level where you’re basically killing yourself. Find ways to automate (the tools of the week are all about this), delegate (definitely hire a VA if you haven’t already) and reduce your overall workload by eliminating busywork that isn’t giving good return on investment.
|
|
|
Yes, two tools of the week this week, both for lead generation on LinkedIn.
|
Dux-Soup | Lead Generation for LinkedIn
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.
|
ConnectDingo | LinkedIn Automation Software
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 - Social Media Monitoring Tool
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! 😎
|
|
A Smarter way to Auto Post on Instagram
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.
|
Bookmark Website Builder - Start your website for Free Today
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.
|
LSI Keyword Generator
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.
|
QnA Maker
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.
|
|
Product Demo Podcast: Gordon Fletcher, Compumagick Associates | By CrankWheel
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.
|
|
The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2018
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.
|
Selling My Bootstrapped SaaS Business
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.
|
Don't Design Your Emails
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.
|
Deep Work is the path to mastery
Ooh I really want to do some deep work now. Oh look, something shiny!! 🤓
|
|
Thanks for reading! I hope you have something fun lined up for the weekend. I’m going to be attending the Iceland Airwaves music festival with my spouse, helping with some construction work around our house, getting a CrankWheel release out the door Sunday night, and finishing the last few episodes of Stranger Things season 2. Quite a full weekend 🤓 Cheers, Jói
|
|
I’ve mentioned Toptal here quite a few times and now that I’ve done a project with them ( CrankWheel’s WordPress plug-in, launching very soon), I can even more heartily recommend them. I’ll do a full write-up of my experience with them soon, but in short, if you need to be sure you’ll get the right development talent and fast, they’re an excellent choice.
|
Did you enjoy this issue?
|
|
|
|
If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here
|
|
Quarter ehf., Kringlan 1, Reykjavík 103, Iceland
|