Latest / Content, Briefly / Aura: Alina Benny's journey to 1 million pageviews/month

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Aura: Alina Benny's journey to 1 million pageviews/month · Content, Briefly

• 0:05
  [on-hold music] The whole way that we think about content at Aura is not SEO content or content for SEO, it's just helpful content arranged or structured in a way that's also easy for search engines to understand.
• 0:19
  And that's just been our philosophy. No shortcuts taken, everything has been by the books. It takes time.
• 0:26
  None of this growth has been overnight, so it's been a very slow roll, but steady, and it feels good to see the results. [on-hold music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:39
  Today, we're talking to Aleena Beni. She's the head of content SEO at a company called Aura. Not the ring, but, uh, cybersecurity direct-to-consumer SaaS product. So that's a kind of a new flavor for this podcast.
• 0:52
  We talk all about what it's like to market a consumer software product. Amazingly, she's been able to build up the blog to over a million page views a month.
• 1:01
  As you might imagine, that piqued my interest, and we dove in to talk more about that. Overall, great conversation. Learned a ton about her attention to detail, particularly related to process. She's big on Asana.
• 1:13
  We talked a lot about that. We talked about how she's built up her freelance roster, again, relying very heavily on good process. So lots to learn here. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too.
• 1:22
  [on-hold music] Hey, everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today with Aleena Beni. She's the head of content SEO at a company called Aura, which I actually originally thought was the wearable ring, but it's not though.
• 1:38
  [chuckles] So I'll probably ask you to explain more about Aura, but maybe first, Aleena, could you introduce yourself, tell us a little about who you are, uh, and some of the work you've been up to for the past couple of years.
• 1:46
  Sure thing. Aura is an identity theft protection company. I've been there nearly two years now.
• 1:53
  I've been in B2B SaaS for nearly my entire career, so Aura is my first direct-to-consumer venture and product that I've worked with, and I have to admit, it has been my favorite role so far.
• 2:06
  It's been the most fulfilling. Prior to this, I was working at a voiceover company called Nextiva. You've probably seen a bunch of folks that used to work at Nextiva, pretty active on LinkedIn.
• 2:18
  And I think my career in content SEO really took off once I joined SalesHacker in twenty eighteen.
• 2:24
  This was prior to their acquisition, and that was my first foray into SEO and doing SEO, and then we get acquired about six to eight months into that role, and then I joined and followed Gaetano to Nextiva.
• 2:36
  And yeah, fast-forward to twenty twenty-two when I ended up at Aura, again through Gaetano and a referral. So it's, it's been great so far, and I hope I can keep working in the cybersecurity space.
• 2:47
  Do you find that many of those companies have the same handful of problems, or does it vary just based on type of company, people, brand, things like that? Pretty much.
• 2:56
  I think the common thing that I've noticed is that a lot of folks don't have one place where they organize everything with content, which you'd think is one of those fundamental things that teams would start off with.
• 3:08
  But either the team is too big or the team is too small, and so ideas are everywhere,
• 3:14
  and people don't know how to manage everything in one place or have no idea how to put everything together, which is one of the recent projects that I did with my most recent mentee, and they didn't have one place to talk about everything that they were working on, and it seems like a very no-brainer type of thing that I helped them with in those three months was to get their Asana set up and looking at that every two weeks to say, "This is exactly what I worked on.
• 3:38
  This is what's moved forward, this is what's done, and here's how I measured it." And I've seen the same problem across most of the companies that I work directly with. Nice. That's very cool.
• 3:46
  It makes sense, especially for early-stage companies. I, I can appreciate that problem, but also having someone else come in and just set it up and help you run through it, I would imagine is extremely helpful.
• 3:55
  You mentioned a moment ago someone named Gaetano, who I only know as, like, a Twitter avatar. Who is Gaetano? Could you tell us a little? 'Cause to me, he's sort of a mystery. I would be curious to know more.
• 4:06
  Gaetano, first and foremost, is a very dear friend. He was my boss, uh, at SalesHacker. That's how we met.
• 4:12
  I knew him through some sort of partnerships that we were doing at Freshworks, my first-ever job, and, uh, so I, I, again, like you, only seen him on LinkedIn. Very, very charismatic. It's hard to ignore.
• 4:24
  My first impression of him is very different from how I think of him today. He, he's just very smart person, has opened many, many doors for me.
• 4:32
  He-- Right now, he's a full-time consultant, and so he works with ma-many different brands, but before this, we share quite a few companies and histories.
• 4:40
  And so he used to be leading all things content on the acquisition side at Aura, and before that, at Nextiva, and he's just overall an amazing, amazing person and very close friend, and, uh, you should definitely bring him on on this podcast.
• 4:55
  Yeah. Maybe I will. I'm definitely gonna follow him. Just curious now. Like, you've piqued my interest. So yeah, maybe we should have him on. Would love to talk a little bit more about Aura.
• 5:03
  So direct-to-consumer cybersecurity product. Who's the customer? Sometimes the challenge with, or at least from my perspective, with direct-to-consumer is, like, everyone in theory could be the customer.
• 5:12
  Like, how do you think about narrowing that down so that you can then, from a content perspective, create stuff that the right people will be interested in? Yeah.
• 5:20
  The way that we price Aura's products, you know, identity theft protection, parental controls, VPN, antivirus, like the whole gamut of things, is by individuals, couples, and families.
• 5:31
  And so really anyone with the budget and resources to think deeply about their online safety is who we target.
• 5:38
  That is in top of mind for a lot of people, but digital safety and even thinking about the number of devices at home, your router, your Wi-Fi safety, is my information on the dark web? Has there been a data breach?
• 5:49
  What do I do next? These kind of questions definitely are already thought by a certain demographic, so that's who we're after. Got it. That makes sense.
• 5:57
  You know, I increasingly think of my own household sort of like a business. There are apps that we rely on heavily to keep our household running. I could imagine this fitting the bill.
• 6:05
  Like, in my house, it's like one password. Like, we have a family one password account. I don't know how we would live without it now. We have shared calendars.
• 6:12
  We use Evernote to scan and archive, like, medical forms and tax stuff and all that kind of thing. So-This is one I haven't explored, but I'm pretty curious to check it out now. For sure.
• 6:22
  And as a tech-savvy marketer, these things come easy to most of us. We've been indoctrinated. We know exactly how to go setting up different types of things and staying safe online.
• 6:32
  But the moment you bring in spouses or your elderly parents or children, they don't have the same type of intuitive thinking about these things, and that's when Aura makes it so much easier.
• 6:43
  You know, you put all your sensitive documents into Aura's vault, and you can monitor your SSN and your family's SSNs, driver's license, home titles, things like that. It's just preventative protection.
• 6:54
  That's really cool. Actually, it sounds like it could maybe replace the fireproof safe I have in a closet with all [laughs] that stuff in it.
• 7:00
  You know, I heard on a different podcast that you were on that you had crossed the one million page views per month mark, and I don't know how long ago that was. Maybe that's, like, way in the rearview mirror.
• 7:11
  I would love to know more about that. Like, how did you scale it to that degree?
• 7:15
  Well, I shot myself in the foot there for a little bit because that was right before all the major updates this year, and our traffic did dip a little bit.
• 7:24
  And, um, in our defense, it wasn't any of the direct topics that we were targeting or any of the direct keywords. It was all secondary. We write a lot about scam content and what to avoid. Mm-hmm. And that seems...
• 7:34
  It's a huge universe, and that type of content is very timely and can accumulate a lot of different types of search, which we did eventually fall off of.
• 7:43
  But we've managed to hold foot on the main topics we're going after. But we're still pretty close, unlike some of the wild case studies that we've all seen on Twitter.
• 7:52
  I'm not going to name names, but none of that type of situation, so I'm very grateful to be in this position. It feels like we've done certain things right. But to answer your question, how do we get there?
• 8:03
  Honestly, it's just been repetitions. There are no shortcuts. We do very in-depth keyword research, try and map it to exactly how it might be useful to any of these different audience types that I mentioned.
• 8:15
  And the whole way that we think about content at Aura is not SEO content or content for SEO, it's just helpful content arranged or structured in a way that's also easy for search engines to understand.
• 8:28
  And that's just been our philosophy. No shortcuts taken. Everything has been by the books. It takes time.
• 8:35
  None of this growth has been overnight, so it's been a very slow roll but steady, and it feels good to see the results. That's amazing. Congrats to you. I mean, really, a million page views a month is pretty wild.
• 8:46
  Just dealing with that scale of content and traffic, how much net new content do you create each month? And then how much time do you spend pruning, refreshing, repurposing older content?
• 8:57
  We publish anywhere between five to seven posts a week, if not more. That's the minimum that we do.
• 9:04
  And over time, the amount of hours that were spent refreshing content, surprisingly or not so surprisingly, has gone down just because, for example, the first time we ever did a content update, which was not so long ago, it was about a year and a half ago, our content was not in a good spot to set very good precedents, and so there was a lot of cleaning up that we had to do, more internal links, better structures.
• 9:27
  The blog was still taking off because there was no blog two years ago and, uh, redesign updates, things like that.
• 9:33
  But fast-forward, uh, two years into the program now, the type of updates that we do are small ones, you know, statistics and dates and pricing and tweaking images or removing them or adding certain types of tables, et cetera.
• 9:47
  So refreshes themselves have become entirely different, and a lot of it we're, we're able to automate or seek more help from developers because we've done it a few times before.
• 9:57
  And because all these past refreshes have also helped us gain momentum on certain SERPs and broadest revenue, we just have a better eye on what to change as well. And so it's an ongoing process.
• 10:08
  It's not something that we do only just once a year. We do it consistently every quarter. And, uh, we don't just have one domain.
• 10:14
  Because of a few acquisitions and partnerships and things, all in all, we have about three domains that we manage, including Aura. And so that's a lot of work. That's interesting.
• 10:24
  That's a whole set of challenges on its own. Of the five to seven posts you publish each week, is that all on the Aura domain, or is that spread across the three?
• 10:31
  Minimum of five on Aura, and then again, maybe two on, um, the second domain that I'm talking about, Identity Guard. And the third one is public acquisition.
• 10:40
  We acquired a company called Meet Circle, a parental control software that is now rolled into Aura. That website isn't publish-ready just yet, but we've a slew of technical SEO updates had to be made.
• 10:51
  You know, we're cleaning up subdomains, things like that, so working directly with developers. So now that's done. In the new year, we're gonna be looking at republishing or starting to put out content again. Nice.
• 11:01
  Very cool. Very cool. There's two things I want to follow up on. One is technical SEO, and one is just how you handle the content production itself. Maybe we can talk briefly about technical SEO first.
• 11:11
  Does that fall under your umbrella? Like, are you managing the technical SEO, or do you have folks on the team who help you with that?
• 11:16
  I'm just thinking, like, with that much content and that much traffic, things probably break, and there's probably a lot of opportunities to unlock additional growth through technical improvements in a way that just doesn't really have the same impact for smaller sites.
• 11:29
  So the good thing about technical SEO is that once you have a good base set up, you're kind of okay.
• 11:35
  And as long as you're not doing anything spammy on the website with too many ads or weird pop-ups, even on the UX side, you're pretty set.
• 11:42
  And I think inherently within B2B SaaS or even, you know, direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies that do content really well, people are savvy about how not to be spammy.
• 11:53
  And then circling back to your question about how we bring it all together, I'm not a technical SEO expert, so a lot of things that I've picked up come from the audits that we do.
• 12:02
  And to talk about this, I need to talk about team size. So we're, believe it or not, two full-time folks with two part-time folks. Wow. And of that part-time, one person is just a consultant or an advisor.
• 12:14
  So technically speaking, there's only two people looking at this every day.All the time.
• 12:20
  And of course, we know how to, over time, learn how to identify when things go wrong or see indications of how the website could be slowing down, or we're looking at search concept reports.
• 12:29
  So our page experience isn't the best, but the thing about technical SEO is, as you probably know, you don't need to fix everything. You just need to fix things that make sense for you.
• 12:38
  And so I don't like saying this out loud, but [chuckles] our mobile experience scores are pretty abysmal. But has that affected conversions from the blog?
• 12:48
  No, it hasn't, and it hasn't negatively affected rankings as far as I can tell. And so for that reason, we've been squaring away that project for later for quite a while now.
• 12:58
  But at some point when, say, we'll, we'll slow down publishing, or we're not gonna focus on refreshes as much, we may resort that and then think more about how we're gonna make the page experience scores a little better.
• 13:09
  And in terms of content production, I mentioned Asana earlier. That's where we live. So we're big advocates of asynchronous communication. We don't talk face-to-face or over calls a lot. It's almost always on Asana.
• 13:23
  And for very important fires, which thankfully don't happen often, is email, and Slack for the small stuff. But Asana has everything, projects for all three domains that we manage.
• 13:34
  We categorize them by content projects or technical SEO, partnerships or backlinks and link-building.
• 13:41
  Within each of those, we have different stages like a Kanban style, actual assignee, external contributors, labels for which freelance writer we're assigning it to, stage of the article, et cetera, next steps, all sorts of wonderful attachments and documents needed for a particular task.
• 13:57
  And we're good about our biweekly cadence, which is when we review numbers as well as the tasks that are in front of us.
• 14:03
  So at any point in time, each of us are working on finishing at least ten things a week, which is great because content, in general, it can just keep going on and on.
• 14:11
  You can just make it a never-ending sort of unquantifiable type of work.
• 14:17
  But the nice thing about the way that we've set it up is that there's always a good idea about who's working on what, how, and by when it's gonna get done. Who handles the actual writing?
• 14:25
  Do you have a team of freelancers or an agency that is doing the content creation part, or does that happen in-house? It's a mix.
• 14:31
  So we do have a bunch of freelancers that we work with, close to about ten people at any point in time. Heavily vetted.
• 14:38
  You need to have a lot of empathy as well as knowledge to write about this, so it's very, as you can imagine, hard to find people with subject matter expertise to come on board and do this.
• 14:49
  So in no way are we looking for SMEs to come as freelance writers. That's where my teammate and I come into the picture.
• 14:56
  So we're the SMEs here, which is why, just to give you an example, I spend about two and a half hours making an outline, and it's only about five to six pages, but it has literally everything that a freelance writer would need, including sources and different angles.
• 15:09
  So it's... I'm not just talking about target keyword, word count, and H2 headers or whatever. I'm talking about actual different segues they need to go into, different rabbit holes, why tables, et cetera.
• 15:20
  And so the process is very hands-on, and it's one of the reasons why we can't publish more. It's just time-consuming. Yeah.
• 15:27
  Two and a half hours per piece is a lot, particularly when you multiply that by a minimum of five to seven articles a week. Yeah. I'm just talking about the outline. Yeah. It's not even the final draft.
• 15:37
  So there are so many steps to, uh, once the first draft comes in. Wow, okay. So all of that is tracked in Asana. Yeah.
• 15:43
  Are there any other tools that you use as part of the, like, specifically the outline or brief creation process? I've been a huge Clearscope advocate for years and years at this point.
• 15:52
  I feel like I should get commissions for the number of times [both chuckling] that I mention Clearscope.
• 15:56
  But that's-- We've tried a whole bunch of different tools, and there are so many out there, and different people lean toward different tools.
• 16:02
  But in general, I feel like Ahrefs, Clearscope, once you're in it, you're, you're kind of in it. You don't really need anything outside of it, but it's a very polarized opinion. Some people just cannot stand Ahrefs.
• 16:14
  Some people cannot stand Semrush. So it's... But we're team Ahrefs. We're heavily dependent on it. We don't really use it for the actual content creation process, more so for keyword research and tracking.
• 16:26
  And Clearscope is what we do just to kind of guide us on the different entities to include in any post, and it's also nice to see how certain keywords are used in other articles.
• 16:36
  We don't get too scientific about it because at the end of the day, it's not about getting that perfect score on any tool. It's really just about, is this answering the question?
• 16:45
  Is this even relevant on this SERP, and should we waste time doing something just 'cause the keyword volume's already high and the CPC is also high, or does it make sense for R to be on this SERP? Yeah, makes sense.
• 16:57
  One new question I've been asking folks is, are there any content pieces on the site that have surprised you?
• 17:02
  Either, like, one you thought was gonna be a big hit that maybe wasn't, or one that you didn't expect to be really popular that is really popular. We've got both.
• 17:09
  So popularity and revenue generation type of posts are two different buckets for us. So remember how earlier I mentioned we lost a little bit of traffic because some of our content was blowing up?
• 17:22
  So imagine things like PayPal scams, Zelle scams, or Facebook Marketplace scams.
• 17:28
  R was number one for so many of those different SERPs just because inherently, those SERPs were dominated by news articles, which didn't really go into those topics in depth.
• 17:38
  So it's very timely, but there was a need for someone to come in and accumulate all of the different type of scams, how to identify it, what do you do, and, you know, something f- that was also constantly refreshed.
• 17:50
  So a lot of different competitors and adjacent competitors, they have content on this, but they don't have the agility to, to update these every other month or quarter.
• 17:59
  And so R does a very good job of making sure that our numbers are up to date. And so our most popular content is in that scam or common topics that you'd see blowing up even on your news websites.
• 18:11
  But the revenue generating stuff, and not too surprisingly, is all the competitor comparison type blog posts or posts that lists a bunch of different competitors. Is it worth it type of posts.
• 18:23
  We ourselvesHave different posts around is identity theft protection worth it? Is our parental controls worth it?
• 18:29
  And again, full disclosure, we say front, side, and center that it's not for everybody and that you don't need it, but if you do have the bandwidth and resources to invest in something like this, this is how it helps.
• 18:42
  So yeah, two different buckets and two different audiences.
• 18:45
  And we learned it the hard way, trying to sell Aura to someone who lands on the website having read or having found us through the Zelle scams post is not always the best way to go, but- You know, I'm really glad you brought this up because one of the things on my list to ask you about was middle and bottom of the funnel content.
• 19:01
  I'm assuming there's no sales team. How do you think about the bucket or lane of content dedicated to conversion?
• 19:07
  Do you rely primarily on the kinda is it worth it or comparison style pieces, or, or are there others that would fall into that same category that you find to be really effective at converting folks?
• 19:17
  It's funny you should ask this because just when we were thinking that only the competitor type posts gives us conversions, we'll see every now and then some of these outliers coming in and giving us conversions.
• 19:28
  So for instance, I gave my SSN to a scammer.
• 19:31
  That post at least gives us one conversion a week, and maybe someone who Googles that or searches for that is not necessarily directly in the market for an identity theft protection service.
• 19:42
  So it's surprising that similar topics, they come into the bottom of the funnel type of conversion post. It's really interesting.
• 19:50
  And nearly twenty-five percent of all our posts bring in at least one last click conversion.
• 19:56
  And so that's also very encouraging for us because, again, it's not just the competitor alternative, is it worth it, X versus Y type of content that brings in conversions.
• 20:06
  It's also some of these middle of the funnel content. Again, these are all imaginary, and in reality, I think it's all blurred.
• 20:13
  The way that some of our definition type posts or not so conversion ready posts helps us is just by brand recall. Because two years ago, Aura was nonexistent on these SERPs. You're thinking about...
• 20:25
  You're only seeing Experian, Equifax, Norton, NordVPN, and then suddenly now you have Aura, Identity Guard, sometimes again Aura, and that's bound to make some sort of effect.
• 20:38
  And it's intangible, unfortunately, because no matter how hard you try to map funnels or, you know, track clicks, it's, there's only so much that you can directly attribute back to. But that's how we think about content.
• 20:50
  So of course, we've slowed down on the
• 20:53
  scam type of content that we publish just because, especially after all the different updates that Google rolled out this year, is it worth our attention as much as it was last year? No, it's not.
• 21:04
  But we're not gonna stop publishing entirely on those topics either. Right. Right. You're queuing up all my questions perfectly. You mentioned attribution, and you mentioned last click.
• 21:12
  Is that the primary way that you attribute content to conversions? One of the directories, yes. We measure both. We measure overall conversions from organic as well as last click conversions from the blog.
• 21:26
  And so the team is responsible or indirectly responsible for all of those different metrics.
• 21:32
  It is not, however, the number one metric that we're measured by just because we don't have as much influence on that actual transaction. Got it.
• 21:41
  And is that a result of just other marketing initiatives, performance marketing or other things? All of these organic conversions I'm talking about is because Aura's organic SEO efforts right now is just the blog.
• 21:53
  We haven't really expanded into landing pages or any other type of content meant for conversions or SEO. And so I guess that way it's easy to attribute what inside of organic is working. It's the blog.
• 22:05
  But in general, we do have skin in the game when it comes to enrollments from organic subscriptions, added order value, customer acquisition costs, et cetera.
• 22:16
  We track all those numbers, no matter how small they are in comparison to other channels that bring in these things.
• 22:21
  But one thing we like or we're very excited about, the whole team really, is we have the lowest CAC, and that helps sort of regulate all the other different channels when you look at input versus output. Yeah.
• 22:32
  That's so interesting. Any reporting or analytics tools did you find to be helpful? Our reporting, uh, I don't know about you, but we've been trying to wrangle with GA4 for a while now. That's one of our primary sources.
• 22:44
  We also have a bunch of different dashboards that were created internally on Tableau. The way that we look at our data is, at least from an organic transactions and SEO perspective, GA4, GSC, Ahrefs.
• 22:55
  So nothing too crazy. We haven't really looked at GA4 alternatives or looked at tools like HockeyStack or anything like that.
• 23:02
  We may, but at least for now, we're still in the we believe in GA4 gang and trying to figure it out. Got it. That makes sense.
• 23:08
  And then related to the cost of customer acquisition, I have spoken with many D2C companies over the years, and many struggle with the unit economics of content marketing.
• 23:20
  Now there's a branch underneath direct to consumer, whereas e-commerce and then consumer SaaS. So Aura falls into the consumer SaaS, which is very different, right?
• 23:29
  But, like, I remember there was a company that I consulted with many years ago who was selling something online, and it was, like, ten to twenty dollars per SKU, and we just couldn't make the numbers work.
• 23:39
  Like, you can't get the cost of content creation low enough while keeping the quality high enough to make any of it actually work. Now because Aura is a SaaS product, that's different.
• 23:50
  And the price point, which looks like twenty to thirty dollars a month subscription basis, like, that does open the door to being able to invest more heavily in content.
• 23:58
  But I feel for the folks, primarily e-commerce folks, who are in so many ways, like, limited in their ability to do content marketing and chained to advertising on social platforms, which just seems like kind of a nightmare.
• 24:10
  It's just so complicated and competitive, and maybe it's 'cause I don't know enough about it. But I am curious about the differences since you have done B2B in the past and are now doing consumer SaaS.
• 24:20
  Like, what are the main differences in the way that you approach content?
• 24:25
  I think, I don't know if it's age or just whatever little travels of the world that I've had.But it's become somewhat easier just because we don't have to invent urgency anymore.
• 24:36
  Any of the content that we produce, it is important content. It needs to be out there.
• 24:41
  Someone needs to be updating it 'cause there are so many different federal reports that come out about all kinds of scams and fraud, you know, FTC, FCC, you name it.
• 24:49
  All kinds of government agencies producing these numbers, but there are very few people who are able to bridge the gap between how much should consumers know and what's important to them, how should they take action versus all these crazy statistics and numbers that are thrown at them.
• 25:03
  And so it's a very responsible in-between to be at, and I enjoy it very much because of that.
• 25:09
  And like you were saying, being in the consumer SaaS space, and not just that, being in the cybersecurity space along with that, is a very sweet spot because it is an essential sort of tool, and everyone's getting more devices, families are growing, scams are growing.
• 25:24
  And so you put all this together, there's an actual need for a company like Aura. And you've always got the bigger, larger companies doing their thing, you know, credit bureaus, all that fun stuff.
• 25:33
  But a company that's nimble enough to still do the work, put up good content, have the right type of customer support, you know, a fraud resolution team, et cetera, it just puts you in a very unique position.
• 25:44
  I don't think I've ever experienced that. In the past, almost all the content that I created was related to sales and marketing or voice-over IP. It's great. It's all fun teams. I've met some amazing people.
• 25:57
  But I don't think I've ever felt this type of an onus to the content that I create as much as I do today. I'm very grateful to be in this position. Yeah. That's really cool.
• 26:06
  What does the next six or maybe twelve months look like for you? Are there a couple projects bouncing around in your mind that you're hoping to tackle in twenty twenty-four? Yeah. I hinted at this earlier.
• 26:18
  Our main organic SEO strategy is limited to the blog right now, so we're very excited about extending that into landing pages and seeing how that works out for us.
• 26:27
  It's also gonna be a whole new ball game for the team because for the two of us, we've almost perfected the content creation process for the blog.
• 26:35
  And so trying to see how we can replicate that for landing pages, if it'll even work, 'cause it's a whole different type of SERP as well, and increasing publishing on Identity Guard as well as Circle, restarting publishing.
• 26:47
  So a whole bunch of projects really, and, and it's exciting because now that we've kind of established the precedent at Aura, we're in a good spot to be able to replicate that same sort of system at the two different domains that we own.
• 27:01
  And maybe, again, we can start focusing on more of the technical SEO updates or the blog could use a redesign, so putting the bells and whistles and yeah. Yeah. There's always stuff.
• 27:11
  There's always stuff like that to work on, which is fun. Before we go, I do wanna ask you about building your freelance team. You mentioned that subject matter expertise is a challenge in this industry.
• 27:22
  I've experienced this at Superpath for sure. Like, we run a marketplace. I spend a lot of time vetting freelancers for different clients, and subject matter expertise is sort of always a challenge.
• 27:32
  But, like, the more niche you get, the more challenging it is. Can you talk a little bit about how you've gone about building up your roster of freelancers? Sure.
• 27:39
  I don't know if you'd agree with me on this, but ninety-nine percent of the writers that we have on board today are folks that we've reached out to and asked to work with.
• 27:50
  And we all get pitched a lot, and there's something about, I don't know if it's the quality of the pitches or the pitches that come in, and we, we try to work with them.
• 27:58
  It's just never-- We've not had as much of a success rate with that route as opposed to us reaching out. And so we find writers proactively with pitches from the company on, say, Upwork.
• 28:10
  We've had tremendous luck there, surprisingly, which I didn't think would work. Found some amazing people based out of Canada, which is great, and I've never met any of these folks.
• 28:19
  We're working closely with them for a year or so or more, some folks for nearly two years, so just as long as I've been on the team. And it goes back to that building faith sort of process.
• 28:30
  We no longer work with some of the freelancers that we worked with earlier on just because of how the content program itself has matured.
• 28:37
  So in the beginning, the goal with the content program was to get content out, to get things indexed, to show search engines that there is such a thing as the Aura blog.
• 28:48
  And in the next phase, it was about rising in rankings, expanding the different topical authority buckets that we have.
• 28:54
  So moving away not just from identity theft, but also establishing footing within parental controls, family safety, VPN, antivirus, et cetera.
• 29:03
  And so with that, I think the level of involvement that we needed from writers also changed. And so those writers who were able to fulfill our initial requirements didn't necessarily add up in that next phase for us.
• 29:16
  And also, as we became more mature in the industry, I guess expectations also rose, and so some writers weren't okay with the type of feedback or just even with the extensive feedback that we were giving.
• 29:26
  And so I feel like we're finally at that place where we have an actual freelance writer onboarding system where one of the first few questions we ask them is, "Are you okay with a long contracting process?
• 29:39
  Because as soon as legal is involved, it's going to take a minimum of forty days to get you into the system, you know, get the contract signed. Multiple people have to view it, and it's a net thirty payment, uh, process.
• 29:50
  If you're not okay with it and if you want something faster, are you okay with Upwork?" And so payments are instant, but Upwork obviously takes a cut. Mm.
• 29:56
  And the other questions that we ask is, "Are you okay with a flat rate for certain lengths of the post?" Because we don't wanna do per word or get into the nitty-gritties of that. That always gets messy.
• 30:07
  And the other question we ask is, "How do you wanna receive feedback?" Because we're going line by line, word by word. We're very specific about the type of content that we want.
• 30:16
  These are examples of the past types of content we've published, and this is what's doing great. This is an example of a bad draft, and this is an example of a good draft.
• 30:24
  And we explain the different line items within the publishing process. So either me or my coworker, they're gonna take a look at the draft. We're gonna leave comments.
• 30:33
  Now, once you fix all that, a line editor is gonna take a look at the draft and make stylistic changes. It's then going to go into publishing. We'll add all the internal links, CTAs, et cetera.
• 30:42
  I'll share that final draft with you. So this is how hands-on we are. Are you okay with that, or is it not okay?
• 30:48
  And so for most of the writers, preempting that friction that may come along later on in that journey, they're open to this. And they say, "Yes. Yeah, this works," or, "This doesn't work."
• 30:57
  And, and those are the folks that are still working with us, and that-- it's been really amazing, so. Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate your attention to detail.
• 31:05
  And actually, I think that one of my main takeaways from this conversation is that great process paired with patience and persistence yields great results. You know, it's like there's no shortcuts.
• 31:16
  You just have to do it the right way, whether it's selecting the topics you'll write about, setting a high bar for quality, building a great freelance team, putting a great process in place with Asana that keeps everyone on the same page.
• 31:27
  Like, those are just fundamental things that I think sometimes are overlooked in favor of creativity or other shiny objects. So kudos to you.
• 31:35
  Really, really cool to hear how you've gone about building this team and this content program. We will obviously link people to Aura, A-U-R-A dot com, if you wanna check it out.
• 31:44
  I think it's always helpful to hear you talk about it and then go see what it looks like out in the wild. Well, how about you, Alina? Where can we send folks to follow along with your work?
• 31:52
  LinkedIn, Twitter, personal website, or anywhere else? LinkedIn and Twitter works fine. I don't post very often, but I lurk around, so feel free to reach out over, uh, any of those platforms. Okay, cool, cool.
• 32:03
  We'll put links in the show notes for people. Alina, thank you so much. Wonderful to meet you. So good to learn about all your work with Aura, and I hope we can do this again sometime. Thank you so much for having me.
• 32:12
  Absolutely. Take care. [outro music]