A Partnership that will make a change: Announcing a SigmaLabs-Ranky collaboration

 

SigmaLabs, Israel’s next generation accelerator is now partnered up with Ranky, the first startup-marketing team that is helping startups from 8 different countries with their growth and marketing.

Ranky, at a glance:

Ranky’s expertise is focused on Content marketing, SEO, Inbound marketing, PPC, ASO, Social media and increasing conversion rates.

At their early stages, even the most brilliant startup founders find it hard to plan and activate their startup’s growth/marketing strategy. Hiring a full time CMO or even a marketing manager is expensive as the startup normally needs help with a multichannel funnel: the organic growth, the social growth, the content roadmap and more.

Each of these channels may require a full time employee which is far from early stage startups budgets.

SEO for instance, which may seem terrifying and too-long-term for some startups, is crucial as not being present organically means zero growth in most industries. In a tutorial that Ranky wrote for Forbes, it shows an example of a strategy that will help early stage startups get traction easily using a clever SEO tactic (see an excerpt below)

Ranky wil be supporting the SigmaLabs teams with their stellar growth:

In this SigmaLabs-Ranky partnership, the startups chosen to participate in SigmaLabs program will benefit from Ranky’s years of experience, in which they helped over 50 startups grow. The startups will receive free office hours with Ranky’s founders in both SigmaLabs office and in the Ranky Headquarters, and assist the startups with their growth plan.

Yoav Vilner, Ranky’s CEO says “as a blogger in magazines such as Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Venturebeat, TheNextweb and more, I am able to help startups plan their content marketing just from my straightforward experience with seeing which content performs better and where. Some articles in Entrepreneur magazines get 100-200 shares, while others get almost 10,000 with lots of traffic. There is logic behind creating engaging content and the SigmaLabs startups will be able to leverage our experience.”

Ranky’s co-founders Yoav Vilner and Shachar Shamir are veteran startup-marketers, bloggers and advising startups at various ventures and accelerators.

A Step-By-Step Guide for Using Content To Raise Funds (excerpt)

I’ve been following the trends behind Google psychology for the past six years and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how could Bill Gates be so accurate in his 1996 predictions from “Content is King”?

Personally, I can’t think of a better proof of concept than showing them your startup’s organic traffic graph exploding through the roof after running for only a couple of months. This is true if you’re seeking your pre-seed round, seed round or even your first round of funds.

The ‘Long-Tails for Big Funds’ Strategy

Here’s what I call the “Long-Tails for Big Funds” strategy. It’s based on acquiring organic traffic in a relatively short period of time, with sufficient numbers to show your potential investors at the early stages.

The only inhouse “tool” you need for this strategy is a company blog, and if you haven’t opened one yet, you’re already far behind your competitors.

The basics of a long-tail keyword strategy is simple. Long keywords that have sufficient search volume as an exact match sentence and are very focused to your target audience means most of them have relatively low competition in the search engine result pages. All the big guns are always competing for generic terms, so you can rise to the top by maximizing on the less often used lines of offense.

There are only 3 phases to this strategy, but you have to be very precise and creative in each one.

Step #1: Research

You need to find questions and ponderings that your prospects are searching for, that carry a nice amount of monthly searches. The first and most basic option is heading over to Google’s Keyword Planner, entering your startup’s relevant keywords and starting to scroll down until you hit long-tail keywords.

Don’t settle for Keyword Planner alone, as that’s the universal tool that everyone else is using. Instead, once you’re done with your “seed” list of long-tail keywords to write about, start using heavier guns to find the low-hanging fruits that your competitors haven’t thought of.

I use ubersuggest to find more long-tail keyword ideas. Simply type into the box strings such as “How Apps” or “Why Kids” and the tool will find all of the searched-for terms that begin with that question. (Such as “How Apps Developers Earn Money”, “Why Kids Hate School”)

Then, you can use Wikipedia to find more long-tail keywords. Head over to the Wikipedia search box and type your startup’s main business, for example – “online marketing”. The table of content for your given results could be long-tail keywords that none of your competitors has ever imagined writing a post about.

One last trick I use is manually going over popular forums in the niche a certain startup is targeting, and basing blog posts according to real user’s thread titles. Nothing beats the real experience and questions of fellow human beings in need.

The last thing you need to research is the most popular articles of your competitors. I recommend QuickSprout’s website analyzer to sort blog posts according to social shares.

Step #2: Write and Optimize

Write the posts based on all of the topics that you have discovered, and publish them only after optimizing them according to desired keywords.

The biggest rule of thumb is having your blog post’s title exactly as the long-tail keyword phrase. Meaning, if you found that 500 people a month Google for “Can Apps Help Me Improve at School?” that should be your post title.

Then, use that keyword at least once more in its full form within the post. If possible, have the URL of the post also carry the same sentence. Whatever you do, don’t over do it. If you use the exact sentence more than once or twice within the post, Google’s panda paws are going to slap you all the way around.

Besides writing a solid amount of words (over 500 is minimal) at a super-high quality, you should also make sure that the blog posts of your startup’s site are as close to the homepage as possible, the most basic way of doing so is making sure that the Blog section is linked from the main menu.

Step #3: Share

Always have a social sharing plugin floating above your blog posts, as more social signals will increase the article’s rankings in Google. Encourage your readers to share in every way possible. Finally, use content sharing platforms such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+ discussion groups, Inbound.org and more.

Whatever you do, in heaven’s name, don’t spam the web by simply pasting your post’s link in blog comments and quora discussions. You will piss everyone off – from search engines to potential readers.

For more questions feel free to contact Yoav from Ranky – yoav@ranky.co