Hi there fellow product enthusiasts and marketing mavens!

Welcome to a new edition of the weekly Bash, covering AI in marketing and product.

This week we’re covering backlink building for SEO with Bash, how you should develop buyer personas, and the latest discussions in marketing, product & AI.

Let’s get into it!

Workflow highlight: Building Backlinks with Bash

You’re not the only one trying to get links placed on third-party websites. Getting in touch with the right people is one of the main hurdles in the backlink acquisition process. Here’s why:

1. Low response rates: Cold emailing for backlinks has notoriously low response rates. Recipients are inundated with requests, which can easily be perceived as spam.
2. Personalization: Generic outreach emails are the norm, but they don't perform well. Personalizing emails for each recipient is time-consuming but necessary to stand out.
3. Relevance: Finding and targeting the right prospects whose content aligns with yours is critical. Irrelevant outreach is not only ineffective but can also damage your reputation.

Did you know that AI can help you get better responses? Check out the full walkthrough on how you can do the same with Bash:

Step 1: Configure Google Alerts for your keywords

You want to be notified of new blogs and pages within your niche the moment they are crawled. Being among the first few to reach out and provide value increases your chances of success.

Input one of your cornerstone keywords. You should pick keywords that have higher search traffic or are discussed often. If not you’ll end up with very few notifications and an empty funnel.

Here’s an example of an alert. Let’s say you’re working on a project management tool and ranking for “task management”. 

• Sources: Select blogs, web & discussions.
• How many: Toggle to  “all results” to increase the number of domains appearing.
• Deliver: Pick RSS feed.

Step 2: Add the RSS feed

The RSS work feed in Bash directly visualizes every Google alert as it’s released. Adding the alerts here instead of your inbox allows you to keep things tidy, find relevant information faster, and reduce distractions. 

To add your Google Alert, select “add new”, then pick “Google Alerts” from the available options and paste the link to the RSS feed in. 

Step 3: Select relevant articles and fine-tune

Does something pique your interest? Save the article as a source in Bash, we recommend first summarizing it to see if it’s a good match for your brand. 

Once you have a better grasp of the content discussed, apply the email template. AI typically gets you 80% of the way, so you use the built-in editor to add your own touch. 

We explain fine-tuning outreach copy in depth in the original article, check it out!

Developing buyer personas: How HubSpot does it

Everyone knows that conducting customer interviews can reveal customer demand, highlights pain points, inspires product development and guides informed business decisions and nobody does this better than Hubspot. We’ve summarized the original guide so you can quickly understand how they do it.

Want to develop your own buyer personas? We turned the HubSpot article into a FREE action plan with goals, tasks, resources, a timeline and responsibilities for different team members, so you can get this going in no time. Copy the Action Plan.

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We would love to hear more about your experience so far and what we can do to improve Bash for you.

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News bites: The Latest Marketing, AI & Product Stories 🎙️

• How to Build an Authentic Personal Brand: Personal branding isn't about ego; it's about forming genuine human connections and strategic marketing. Learn more
• AI news: Live translation on phones, Meta aims at AGI, AlphaGeometry, and political deepfakes. Learn more
• The Marketing Hill Mash: Quick and Dirty Tricks for Upping Your Marketing Game: The pitfalls of spamming email inboxes and the importance of brand building for sustainable growth. Learn more

Nuggets for thought on building backlinks 💭

• Quality over quantity: One high-quality backlink can be worth more than a hundred low-quality ones. Focus on earning links that will truly impact your SEO.
• Relevance is key: A backlink from a related site within your industry can be far more powerful than a random link from an unrelated niche.
• Earn, don't buy: Purchased backlinks are often spotted by search engines and can lead to penalties. Genuine, earned backlinks are more sustainable.

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