S1E9 – Creating a content strategy that drives signups with John Ozuysa

Creating a content strategy that drives signups

What is content? Or better yet, what is good content? Do you know how to create content that drives and converts into signups and paid clients? In today’s episode, we host John Ozuysal, the co-founder of Datapad and advisor to other startups. We discuss how to create a B2B SaaS content strategy that drives signups. 

He shares some of his tricks and tips for driving 500 signups within three months by leveraging content while his company was still in its infancy stage. Indeed, today’s show will be valuable for a lot of startups seeking to use a long-term strategy to produce content that drives signups. 

Over the years, John has dealt with content creation for startups in their infancy stages. 

John observes that most people regard content as SEO. On his part, SEO is not equivalent to content but rather a distribution channel for content. He describes content to be anything that offers value to the end user. These could include email conversations and internal written procedures (SOP’s) 

Our guest expert explains that you should write content for the target audience. He advises against creating content simply for the sake of ranking high. It helps to understand the target audience’s problem and why they would read it. Often, readers lose interest when they do not find the connection between the content and their situation and thus fail to convert. 

It is crucial to undertake detailed content research into the problems of the audience and their desired solution. As such, understanding whom you are writing for helps to grab their attention. You should get your ideal customer profile in order by writing to match their expertise level, not below nor over. 

John loops in product-led content marketing as an effective strategy for writing content to generate signups. In this regard, you benefit greatly if you create content with high relevance to your business. A mention of your product is most appropriate if you are offering the ultimate solution for the customer’s problem. In this regard, John advises against offering generalized Advice and instead providing a clear explanation to the reader on how to solve their problem using your tool. The use of demos, for instance, can go a long way to hook the reader.

As an interesting point, John explains why he does not do link-building for his content. He says that he prefers to use his topical authority and content velocity. Following the topical authority methodology, he selects the most relevant to the business and writes everything about it. The detailed content on the topic helps it to rank faster and higher on Google. Using content velocity, he purposely publishes as much good content as possible in a short time to help it rank faster and higher. 

During his topical mapping, John explains that he uses internal backlinks for all relevant content. This greatly works for startups in the early stages with minimal resources because it is speedy. 

Common mistakes made with creating a content strategy. Limiting yourself to keyword tools. He says that you should ask the customers how and what they search for content. It, therefore, helps, during signup, to seek the problem and the desired solution from the customer. 

Thoughts on the rise of Chatgpt in content writing. He admits that he utilizes the tool for fast-tracking some functions in research instead of writing content with it. It helps generate content keyword ideas, optimize SEO, and identify entities from paragraphs. 

John dives into affiliate marketing and writing content for signups. Instead of focusing on the transactional page and leaving it in the hope it will rank, he advises creating supporting pages to link to the transactional page. It gives your content greater visibility to other potential companies that may want to affiliate with you to promote their content. 

Advice to startups growing to 10k MRR? Reverse your funnel by starting at the bottom with content targeting an audience seeking solutions like the one you offer. 

Advice to startups growing to 1M ARR? Invest more in the middle and top of the funnel. Using customer research, you should build next-generation features by writing relevant content. 

Key Time Stamps

  • (01:47) Why you need to listen to John 
  • (02:43) What is content 
  • (03:15) Difference between writing content and content that converts
  • (04:34) What needs to be in place before creating content 
  • (06:42) Strategies for writing content to generate signups 
  • (10:00) Why does he not do link-building for his content?
  • (14:13) Does he create yellow pages for topics he writes about 
  • (17:28) Common mistakes with content strategy 
  • (20:50) His thoughts on ChatGbt for content writing 
  • (22:11) Affiliate marketing and writing content for signups
  • (22:50) Advice to companies with 10k monthly recurring revenue 
  • (26:00) Advice to companies with 1 million annual recurring revenue 
  • (27:20) John’s templates on offer and contact information

Transcription

00:30 – Joran Hofman
Welcome back to another episode on the Grow Your B2b SaaS podcast. In this podcast, we’ll discuss all topics related to growing your SaaS. No matter in which state you’re in, a long term organic growth strategy is to produce content. Producing a lot of content doesn’t always mean that it will convert into signups and paid clients. After today, we’re going to talk about how to create a B two B SaaS content strategy that drives signups. We’re going to do this with John Oz. He’s the co founder of Datapad, an advisor to other startups, exited one company and invested as a hobby in a couple of startup. As he doesn’t like to call himself angel investor, when his own startup still was in precede modus, he was able to drive 500 signups using content in under three months. I know this is going to be a great learning for a lot of startups, considering he did it with a new domain, without link building and no promotion. 


01:22 – Joran Hofman
He even stopped investing in SEO right now, as they’re still onboarding new clients manually and he can’t handle the volume. Yet today he will be sharing his tips and tricks so you can do the same. So, without further ado, welcome to the show, John. 


01:35 – John Ozuysal
Thanks, man. I’m happy to be here and have a conversation with you today for the great intro. I love it that you call me angelia investor because I don’t call myself that. I’m more like a baby investor, not angel investor. 

Why should you listen to John Ozuysal?


01:46 – Joran Hofman
Nice. I always like to ask this question, especially for the people who weren’t convinced after this intro. Can you explain in your own words why people should listen to you today? 


01:55 – John Ozuysal
I’ve been in the startup game for very long time, especially on the early stage startups. If you go over to my LinkedIn profile, you see like, there are a lot of case studies that, unlike other people, I wouldn’t mind sharing more details. If you DM me and ask me the details and we can have a conversation and all those case studies that I share, what differentiates me from the other leaders? I guess I like being technical. I don’t hire a big team and tell them to go and do this thing. I like being hands on and going into the details. Everything that I’m going to share is based on what I actually do apart from the writing. I would say, like, this is one of the reasons why you should listen to me. I also scale several startups from zero to one. I wouldn’t be able to do it, I guess, if I don’t know what I’m doing. 

What is content?


02:36 – Joran Hofman
Exactly. Nice. We’re going to talk about, of course, producing content today. I guess maybe to start with the really basics, what do you consider content? 


02:45 –  John Ozuysal
For me, content is what most people consider is first of all, let me start with that. What most people consider content is just like SEO, right? People say SEO is content. SEO is not content, it’s a distribution channel. For me, content is like it could be anything, even your internal SOPs could be content, right? Your email conversation with your colleague could be content. Anything that is provided by you and it provides value to the end user could be content, right. It’s not just an SEO. That’s how I see the content. 

The difference in writing content versus writing content to generate sign-ups


03:13 – Joran Hofman
Nice. Maybe one thing before we really dive in, what do you think is the biggest difference in your opinion between writing content versus writing content to generate sign ups? 


03:24 – John Ozuysal
Yeah, that’s a great question. Especially the rise up in AI, a lot of people are having a conversation is AI is going to replace the human writers and all that stuff. I’ll tell you this, I have seen bad content can rank. It can rank number one, it can rank number two. But bad content won’t convert, right? If you’re just writing content for the sake of ranking, you might get lucky and you might rank. Remember that there is someone else reading that content, right? If your content is going to convert, first of all, you need to identify who you’re writing for. You need to know the expertise level of that person. You need to understand their problems, why they’re reading it, what is the search intent, what they’re trying to achieve, and then write that content for them so that they feel that, okay, this content is written for me and this is exactly for my problem. 


04:08 – John Ozuysal
I see that this company is solely my problem. I could go and give them a go versus like when you just write a content for the sake of ranking, you will rank. I’ll read it. People usually smell that it’s a bad content from an intro and you’ll lose my interest. Like, I’ll bounce. I think that’s the key differentiation. 

When should you start producing content?

04:25  – Joran Hofman
Yeah, that’s really good. I think one thing you mentioned as even now with OpenAI, it is indeed really easy to start producing content. Like before writing any content, whether how you’re going to do it, what in your opinion should be in place before you even start producing content. 


04:42 – John Ozuysal
Before I write my content, obviously I do a very detailed content brief, but even let’s go before that, right? First of all, you need to do your customer. You need to do your customer. You need to talk with your customers. I use like jobs to be done methodology. You need to do your customer interview so that you understand the problem of your audience, the current solution that they’re using, the desire how their life is better. After using your tool, you need to understand all these things and then turn that into a brief as well. If you don’t understand who you’re writing for, then you lose people, right? I’ll just give you one simple example. It’s going to make sense. Let’s say that you’re writing a content and you have a tool, and that tool helps with increasing commercial rate optimization and your audience are the Senior CRO people. 


05:27 – John Ozuysal
You’re writing an article and it’s like Ten Best Tips on commercing better. The first thing that you see on the article is what is CRO? The article title is like Ten Best Tips for Increasing Your Conversion Rate. If you started with something like what is CRO? I am a Senior CRO person and I’ll read that article and I’ll be like, this is under my expertise level. I’ll just understand that this is written just for the sake of ranking. You’re writing under the expertise level of your audience. It’s important before you write any content, everything about your audience, right? And that’s a must. That’s the step that many people skip. 


06:08 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, and I think this definitely comes to another podcast we recorded, as in get your ideal customer profile in order. Because in the end, if people do actually read the content, they click on the link. It doesn’t mean they’re going to convert because they’re probably not going to be the right match for you. 


06:23 – John Ozuysal
Yeah, exactly. You can lose them from the first paragraph. As I said, if you write over the expertise level of your audience, you might lose them too. If you write below the expertise level of your audience, you’ll still lose them. The best way to do it is like match their expertise level, match their search intent. You can’t do that if you don’t know your customers. 

Strategies & process to use when creating content that drives signups

06:39 – Joran Hofman
Exactly. This is, I guess, like already one part of the process you need to figure out before writing content, right. To really drive sign-ups. Would you have any other processes, or strategies like you use when you are writing content to generate sign-ups? 


06:55 – John Ozuysal
Yeah, so I’m just focusing on the generating sign up part of the things, right. Not on the ranking services. The thing is, there’s this thing called product led content marketing. It’s basically you’re writing around the topics that have a high business relevancy for you. What is high business relevance? It means that if you’re writing about the topic where you’re the ultimate solution for that problem, there’s no way why you should not mention your product there as an ultimate solution. What most people will do. Let’s say that you have a software about reducing churn and you have this article how to Reduce Churn for a SaaS Business. Well, your solution is the ultimate thing, ultimate solution for your customers, right? If you go and do like, you give them some generalized tips, ten ways of reducing it and at the end you just have a call to action. 


07:43 – John Ozuysal
Say, hey, use XYZ tool, it’s great for reducing churn. Well, you’re not doing a product like content marketing how your readers will know that your tool is the ultimate solution. The best way of doing this thing is instead of giving generalized advice, you go and explain people how you can solve that problem for them step by step. Use interactive demos, use screenshots there and there so that they’re like, oh my God, I understand there’s a solution there and this solution could help me out. This is not salesy. Most people call this sales. Like, I do a lot of advisory and when I mentioned this thing, people say, oh, this is sales. No, this is not sales. There’s nothing wrong with helping your readers and I think that is very important when it comes to creating content that is going to generate sign ups for you. 


08:27  – Joran Hofman
Yeah, and I can definitely relate to this because we have been producing a lot of content and we wanted to make it less salesy, as you would call it. In the end, we’re not actually selling our products. We are going to make some changes there as well to also, of course, embed what we actually can do for them. 


08:42  – John Ozuysal
Yeah. Also if you want a great example, I think the best blog about this product like content marketing is definitely Ahrefs. I would urge everyone to check Ahref. They have great examples. One new trend out there is trying an interactive demo. I’m going to be experimenting with this as well. Let’s say that we’re doing a how to related article and you want to show people how they can solve the product, how they can solve the problem with your product in five steps in your old ways, what does reach out or video there? But now there are interactive demos, right. You can use interactive demo in each step and people can actually interact with your product and get AHA moment much earlier before they sign up. I would urge you to try something similar to that as well. They’re amazing tools that help you to do interactive demos. 


09:24   Joran Hofman
Nice. Would they then embed it in their content? Basically they would just show. Exactly. They would write the content and then show well, yeah, that’s good. 


09:32  – John Ozuysal
That’s one of my experiments. I tried the interactive demos on landing pages and home pages. It does work well because, you see, most people are allergic to book a demo stuff. They want to understand the value of your product before they get into any kind of engagement with you. It’s going to be my experiment to put it onto my blog post as well. 

Why John doesn’t build any back links for his content? 


09:52  – Joran Hofman
I’m curious to hear about those results on LinkedIn, probably, and this is definitely going to be my next question because about sharing results. On LinkedIn, I definitely saw a couple of posts from you already passing by where you share a certain success about how much sign up you’ve been driving with content. One thing you mentioned, as in you did not actually build any links towards that content. I think the main question is, what is the reason you’re not also doing link building? 


10:19 – John Ozuysal
That’s a good question. I get asked this question quite a lot. People who are into link building do not hate me. I’m not saying that I’m against the link building. I have great friends who are link building. It’s just I don’t get into that because it’s not something that it’s not my expertise. I’ve been doing this thing like, I’ve been into content market SaaS content marketing for the six years, and I scaled a lot of companies and I didn’t build links. I’ll explain why and what is my methodology. Right? I use a method called a topical authority plus content velocity. Right. In my opinion, if a topical authority is basically like, in simple terms, without using any technical jargon, is you pick a topic that is closely related to your business, right? And you write everything around. Again, if it was Churn, if our topic if Churn, then we don’t just go and write best Churn management software. 


11:10 – John Ozuysal
We write everything about what is churn, how to reduce churn, how do you measure churn versus another metric. You write everything about that topic. You cover it from all angles that Google considers you as a topical authority. You write something next time, you rank faster, so you get the priority. That’s what I think, and that is the methodology that I always try to follow. If I’m building a blog from scratch, then what I usually do is I go to Navbar and I look at the features and use cases to try to understand what are the core topics that I should be focusing on. The next thing that I do is I do my keyword research and I do my topical mapping, right? Again, if the topic is Churn, then I look at how many pages I need to create to cover anything related to this topic. 


12:01 – John Ozuysal
This gives me an idea of like, okay, well, how long it would take for me and how much budget I need to spend for this and how many sign ups I can expect from this. The next part of the strategy is the Content Velocity part. I think this is big and there are like, other people out there who supports this. Content Velocity is basically trying to publish as many content as possible, good content, not just content. And it helps you to rank faster. You have this time, right, total available market size. The faster you cover it. I believe that the faster you rank and Google rewards you for it. For me, when I start a new blog, I like generating at least 50 parts per car. If I have small team, I still like to go like 50 per car. The faster and more content I produce, the higher the chance for me to rank. 


12:47
– Joran Hofman
You mentioned 50 blocks, and what kind of time frame would you push those out? 


12:52
– John Ozuysal
Like in a quarter, right? In my last experience, as I said, went from zero to months, but actually we did most of the work we did this spring, I like to work in Sprints and just go all in. I think we like I don’t want to be misleading because it’s been some time. I think we did like 64, 65 pieces in around like, three and a half months, and we just published everything. After that, I basically sat down and watched traffic grow week over. In my view, if you publish 50 pieces in a quarter, you will watch the organic growth week over week, but not just any content, right? People usually get me wrong when I say, hey, you got to publish a lot of articles. Let’s say you publish like, 15 a quarter. What they do is, okay, I’m going to publish 15 a quarter, but they publish like 500 or 600 articles just to make that number. 


13:45 – John Ozuysal
Oh, like, I published 50 yet and I’m not getting a result. Well, it’s very hard if you’re a new domain and you’re trying to publish a lot of content with like, 500 words. One, you’re not going to serve the search engine. Two is like, it’s not going to be comprehensive to make your readers happy. Three is like, there’s this thing called an information gain score. It’s basically your content versus other ranking content and how you’re providing more information compared to others. I think it’s very hard to do that with 500, 600 word articles. 


14:12 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, that makes sense. One other question regarding the beginning thing. You said you mentioned you do the topical mapping, right? Do you always create pillar pages for a certain topic you write about or how does it work? You publish these 50 pieces, right? Where did you guide them towards? Did you guide them towards the home page? 


14:27 – John Ozuysal
The thing is, let’s call it like hub and spoke model, right? You will see that some people will do, let’s say again, like a Churn software. Let’s give an example for Churn. Even though I have nothing to do with it, I don’t know, it just keeps coming to my mind. Let’s say that you want to write on Churn, right? You can have a physical silo. Physical silos. Basically, you have think about it as like one landing page, right? In that landing page, you’re linking out to ten subcluster articles. It could be something like, what is Churn? How to measure churn, how to reduce churn and all that stuff. In that one landing page, it’s like your menu, right? You give the chapters there, you give of information about these pages, but you don’t read the whole thing. You go to other page, right? That’s building a physical silo. 


15:10 – John Ozuysal
It works well if you have the budget because you need to create that page. You need engineering resource and everything. On the other hand, you can create a virtual silo by interlinking all your relevant content together and still get the same impact that you would get with the physical silo. I usually go the second way because I care about the speed, especially because when you work with the early stage startups, the resources are scarce, right. And you want to go fast. What I do is I don’t skip my internal linking. I internally link all my relevant posts together and that’s what I would advise to everyone. Most people are concerned about the external backlinks and they completely forget about the internal backlinks. You’re missing out on a lot if you’re not thinking internal linking. 


15:52 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, this is, I think really good. 


15:54 – John Ozuysal
The thing is sorry, just the one tip. I know that all this topical cluster and stuff can be confusing, but if you want to try something and you’re like, hey, I don’t have a lot of budget and I don’t have a lot of resources, but I want to create a content that is going to generate sign up for me, right? What I would do if I were you is basically like I would identify the transactional terms of the money page. Again, I’ll give an example of churn. So best Churn management software, right? That is your high intent transactional keyword. It’s going to be a listicle where you mentioned a couple of those and you’re probably going to put yourself high up there to generate signups, right? You’re like, okay, well, how do I support this? How do I build a mini cluster around this content? 


16:37 – John Ozuysal
Right? What do I need to write to support this page? If that’s the case, what you can do is basically take that page, take the URL, and you’re using a tool like Ahrefs, you can put the URL to Ahrefs, and there is a section on the AHS where it shows the internal links to that page, right? I would pick the number one result, put it onto Ahrefs, check all the incoming internal links to that page. That’s going to give you an idea of how your competitors build a mini cluster around that money page. You can find some content ideas and you can say, oh, maybe I didn’t write how to reduce churn, I didn’t write how to measure churn article. You can go and write these things and build a cluster on this transactional page. 


17:17 – Joran Hofman
Yeah. It’s really nice that people don’t do it. There’s so much information in tools like Href or Samba where you can get a lot from so don’t invent the wheel. That’s definitely for sure. 


17:27 – John Ozuysal
Yeah. 

Common mistakes made when creating a content strategy

17:28 – Joran Hofman
You already mentioned, I think, one mistake companies are making writing these short articles to hit, I guess, the volume. Do you have any other common mistakes you see people making in their content strategy? 


17:38 – John Ozuysal
With the content strategy, the one common mistake that I keep seeing over and over again is starting. I love keyword research tools, by the way. Some people get me wrong when I say this. They start the content strategy with the keyword research tool and they end it there. That’s not the way to do it, right? The keyword research tools are tools that is going to help you to create, help you to find some ideas. You don’t get those ideas just from the keyword research tools you start from your customers. That’s the most common mistake. If you just look at your competitors, how do you know that they’re doing it correctly? Do you go and copy? How do you know that it works for them? You go and check with your customers. What I do is I at least interview like ten to twelve customers, like one one video interview like this. 


18:24 – John Ozuysal
I tried to understand how did they search, if they found me through organic. How did you do the search? What did your journey look like, what information you came with, what keywords you used? Sometimes I even asked them if it was reaching out. I would tell them, hey, can you please share your screen and walk me through how you search, how you found me? Right? I will record it and I would see the journey there. I will try to be present and eat each step they took in that journey. Most people don’t do this because it takes time, right? It takes time to have a conversation with ten to twelve people and then understand how do they define their problem, how do they define their desired outcome in everything. Most people skip it, but if you’re going to do it, especially for early stage startup, please don’t skip this. 


19:10 – Joran Hofman
Yeah. I can imagine if you do this, you have to do it fast. As soon as people sign up, you kind of have to reach out because otherwise they forgot how they got to you. 


19:18 – John Ozuysal
Yeah. The one thing that always helped me is asking this one simple question in a sign up blow, right? There’s this thing called the handshake moment. Handshake moment is when someone is like super hyped to give your product a try. As soon as they sign up, they’re like, oh my God, yeah, I’m going to get the results, I’m ready. That is the right time to ask them the question and that what question should be like, what problem are I trying to solve with my tool? Or what motivated in your life that triggered you to sign up today? Even that can help with your keyword research. Why it can help is because you will either know the problem that I’m trying to solve, okay? Now you can go and write a content on that problem and show how you can solve that problem or you will know my desired outcome right, why I’m here for again, you can go and write the content around this. 


19:58 – John Ozuysal
So even this simple thing can help. If you’re saying that, hey John, I don’t have a lot of customers or my customers don’t want to talk to you, the letter one is usually an excuse, right? Because usually people are lazy to ask. Okay, well, there’s another option which is actually posted this on my LinkedIn. It got pretty good traction is I use G Two, right? I use G Two, especially if you’re a sauce. I use G Two to look at my competitors. There’s a section on the reviews where it says, if I’m not wrong, how is this product helping you to solve your problem? It’s basically you can get the jobs to be done of your prospects from there and that could really fuel your keyword research process because you will see why people use your competitors tool, how they frame that problem or desired outcome. 


20:45 – John Ozuysal
And that can help you big time. 

What effect will have OpenAI / ChatGPT on content marketing? 

20:47 – Joran Hofman
This is interesting. I’m going to do it right after this podcast. I have to ask it of course, like OpenAI chat GPT. It has been a big rise, of course, last month. How do you look at it like content marketing wise? As in what is your opinion on the rise of it? 


21:02 – John Ozuysal
I use it, but not for content writing. I’m using it my VA right now. It’s really helping me to make some things much faster. Sometimes I’m using to get like keyword ideas, some content ideas, but most of the times I’ve users, I’m using it for SEO optimization, entity based SEO optimization. I use it to find relevant entities and extract entities from the other articles and text paragraphs. The one thing that really helped me is like, I can do things much faster now because it feels like I basically have a VA. But I don’t write content with it. I just use Chet GPT on my research process. Right. It helps me to do the basic stuff much faster. 


21:38 – Joran Hofman
I think that’s definitely the way to go. Like, don’t have it write content for you, but make sure that it helps you to do things faster. 


21:44 – John Ozuysal
Yeah, but it also added this fear to my life. I sold it and I was like I was curious. Obviously I work with all the freelancers and most of them are the freelancers that have been working for some time. As I work with the new ones, right? I get an article fast and I’m like, is this an AI content or not? Luckily there are AI tool detectors out there that now I’m using it in my content progress, which is really helping me to sleep much better. 

How to create a content strategy as a B2b SaaS affiliate?

22:10 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, makes sense. One question regarding affiliate marketing, as is an affiliate management platform. Affiliates also write a lot of content. I mean, that’s what they do to produce of course, sign ups towards the clients they recommend. Would you have any tips for them how they can write content which is going to convert into paying clients for the SaaS companies they recommend? 


22:31 – John Ozuysal
Yeah, well, first of all, to generate sign ups, first you need to get eyeballs, right? If you’re an affiliate person, you’re mostly going to focus on this Best XYZ Tools or XYZ Person or these kind of things. The commercial intent ones, just like everyone else, right? One thing you should do is not to just focus on transactional page and just create it and leave it there and hope that it’s going to rank. What I would do is I would try to create supporting pages around that topic as well. Again, if you’re writing for Best Churn Software, then I would go and also write what is Churn, how to reduce churn, how to measure Churn, like all the supporting content and then link out to my transactional page. That’s the best way to go. Try to build a topical authority around the topic that you’re trying to do. 


23:21 – John Ozuysal
Affiliate, I think most people just put one content there, the transactional content, leave it there. Maybe they’ll just do additional one or two and just leave it there. They’re not going to interlink it, but I think that’s not the way to go. Make sure if you’re just writing a transactional page, make sure that you’re building a mini cluster around it so that you’re supporting and showing Google that, hey, Google like, I am trying to build a notor. 

Content Strategy advice for SaaS founders growing to 10k MRR

23:40 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, and this is definitely going to help in many ways. Not just by ranking, but also getting more companies who want to work with you and actually want to get themselves listed in your article. Cool, we’re coming to the end. I always like to ask these two questions as in advice per stage SaaS companies are in. Regarding creating a content marketing strategy, what advice would you give for companies just starting out and trying to grow to ten k monthly recurring revenue? 


24:06 – John Ozuysal
Ten k is rather easy. The thing is, like, I already gave the example of never skip customer research. The other thing is what most early stage companies do is I don’t know if they hear it from somewhere, maybe their bodies are talking about how to do content marketing in Booktail Party or something like that. But everyone’s acting like a huge company. They. Start, oh, let’s do some PR or let’s do some awareness, or let’s do some brand building. Okay, well, you’ll do all that stuff good. But you only have five customers. Just like just calm down and start building your funnel from bottom top, right? I say bottom top, what most companies, I say they start with top of the funnel. Most people think that funnel, they look at the marketing as a funnel, which is I don’t believe that. It’s just like a vertical funnel like that they see, okay, well, if I take someone from top of the funnel, I’ll move them to middle of the funnel, and then I’ll move them to bottom of funnel. 


24:53 – John Ozuysal
It’s easy. They just click on articles and then they’ll become a customer. No, it doesn’t work, especially if you’re in B to B sauce. Could take months, right? You don’t have months as an early stage startup. What you want to do is reverse the funnel. You start from the bottom of the funnel. You start writing content about people who are looking for solution like yours. Best tools. Some people call this middle of the funnel, some people call this bottom of the funnel. I’m just going to give examples of it. You start from content that you start from targeting people who are looking for a solution like yours. Best tool, best competitor alternatives, best tool for XYZ use case or Persona. And then you move your way up. You start writing about the jobs to be done of your audience. What is it that they want to achieve? 


25:37 – John Ozuysal
How to reduce churn. Okay, let’s write how to reduce churn and show people how to do that. At the end, you come to the top of then you can do your brand building, your PR activity, because now you’re exhausted bottom of the funnel and you’re generating sign ups and you made some revenue year. You can expand into other topics and build different funnels. That’s my number one advice. If we don’t count the customer research part of things. 


Content Strategy advice for SaaS founders growing to 1M ARR

25:58 – Joran Hofman
Nice. Once you pass that ten K mor. You’re going towards the next milestone, 1 million arr. What kind of advice would you give them? They probably have a team, they have more resources. 


26:09 – John Ozuysal
Once you pass, that like a million error, by the way. You should still invest in middle to bottom funnel even when you pass those. Once you have a business, not a startup, once you have a business that is generating revenue for your customers, what you need to do is this is something that I do quite often, is I would survey my customers and try to understand what comes after me. Right? So just step back. Don’t only focus on the problem that you’re solving, but focus on the problem of your audience that comes after you or before you. Right? If I’m a tool that is helping you to put all your KPIs in one place. My audience, like my ICP is, let’s say, venture capitals, right? They want to keep all their portfolio companies metrics there, and my tool is helping with that. Because I do my customer research, I know that the next problem they’re trying to solve is how do I send this report to my investors? 


27:02 – John Ozuysal
Maybe you start building features around that and you write content around that. Don’t just focus on what you’re solving today, focus on what comes after you, what comes before you as well, both in terms of features and product and also the content marketing side of things as well. 


27:16 – Joran Hofman
Really good feedback and really good insights. You shared a lot of content today. Shared a lot of insights today. Do you have any templates you can share with listeners who want to get things kicked off? 


27:29 – John Ozuysal
I actually recently released, or I will be releasing my three blog post templates that I use. Most of that generate sign up for me. One is jobs to be done desired, outcome focused content. The second one is current solution focused content. The third one is solution Focused so I can provide a link for the template and hopefully you get the best out of it. Your listeners get the best out of it and always feel free to reach out to me and ask any questions about it. 


27:55 – Joran Hofman
Yeah. Where can people reach out to you? 


27:57 – John Ozuysal
The best place is LinkedIn. I’m trying to be active there as much as I can. My LinkedIn is John Ozisal. I know it’ll be hard to spell my last name for most of you, but I’m sure that you’re going to put my tag there. 


28:09 – Joran Hofman
Exactly. We’re going to put the link in everything we do so people can find it, so they can just search for John Oz a lot easier for us. Thanks again for coming on the show and thanks again for sharing your knowledge today, John. 


28:22 – John Ozuysal
Thanks, Ben. I really enjoyed it. I hope that everyone who listens to this enjoys this and speak to you soon. 


28:28 – Joran Hofman
Cheers. Thanks. 


28:29 – John Ozuysal
Cheers. 

Joran Hofman
Meet the author
Joran Hofman
Back in 2020 I was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and I was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month with my site. Due to the issues I experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income I was hoping for. Many clunky affiliate management tools lost me probably more than $20,000+ in affiliate revenue. So I decided to build my own software with a high focus on the affiliates, as in the end, they generate more money for SaaS companies.
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