Podcast Boost + Testing Paid Ads

2020 started with a bang in terms of customer growth at InboxDone.com.

In 2019 I recorded an interview for John Lee Dumas' podcast, Entrepreneur On Fire. I was originally one of John's first ten podcast guests back when he was an unknown, appearing on his show to talk about my success with blogging and email marketing, so we had a prior connection.

I emailed John in 2019 about coming back on to the show to talk about email productivity and he agreed. We recorded the episode but it wasn't due to come out for months.

In a case of good timing, the episode was released in January 2020, just when everyone was heading back to work and thinking about starting new things.

https://www.eofire.com/podcast/yarostarak/

I've done a lot of podcasts over the years, including many to promote InboxDone, with mixed results. It's definitely one of our better marketing channels, and John's show turned out to be the best performing podcast so far.

We had a rush of discovery calls in the two weeks after the episode was released - I think we did about 8 in total because of the podcast. Two of those people became customers and are still with us today.

One of those customers was an exciting addition from my point of view because he was a silicon valley entrepreneur success story, with a history of co-founding well known companies that later had big exits.

Personally, I was becoming more interested in angel investing, which I was doing on the side as a member of some syndicates since 2018 (although my first angel investment was back in 2008).

In 2020 we also had another customer from the venture capital world become a customer, and just recently a very well known angel investor signed up for us to handle the email of her team.

All of this led me to think that maybe the sub-niche of VCs and startup founders could be worth going after with a marketing campaign.

Although for a long time I knew paid ads was something we should test, we frankly didn't have the budget to both hire an agency AND fund the ad campaigns.

After having a conversation with an agency, I decided to just jump in myself and see how far I could get with Google Adwords. Google intent search is our largest source of new leads, so I figured ads on intent search was also the best place to start buying some traffic.

I dived in, powered up a Google Ads campaign, used my knowledge of keywords and copywriting to setup some campaigns, and carefully spent about $20 a day to see what happened.

It took about a month of experimenting, adding negative keywords (for example I had no idea that 'inbox zero' was also a furniture brand!) and testing different search terms, which led to a conclusion -- there wasn't much search traffic looking for 'email management' related phrases.

Despite the lack of traffic, I do feel good that we have a campaign up and running, which does send through 10-20 extra clicks per day for very targeted search phrases.

After realizing I could do a lot myself with Google, I decided to also try Twitter and LinkedIn ads.

Twitter is awesome, easy to setup, cheap enough clicks (around $1, but it was just 40 cents when I started) and so far sent one customer in an indirect way (my ad was retweeted by someone with 70,000 followers) so the ROI is there.

LinkedIn was not quite as easy to get my head around, but I had a voucher for $100 of ads, so I set up a campaign. The clicks at LinkedIn cost about $4 -- expensive! Since it would cost a lot to even figure out if it works, I stopped after I spent my free credit.

As I type this I'm still running Google and Twitter ads, with my plan next to get the retargeting campaigns up and running and see how much they cost.

I expect I will spend many more months testing paid ads, expanding to include Facebook/Instagram, etc, but with a limited budget I have to do this slowly.

Yaro