This is an archived version of the original newsletter, sent via email.

Apologies for not sending last week. This week is a continuation of my interview with Ilya Lichtenstein, CEO and co-founder of MixRank, a platform that allows you to spy on your competitors’ ad campaigns. Ilya, in a past life, was also an affiliate marketer, and so this interview is focused on how he does paid advertising effectively.

He was also generous to offer Startup Frontier readers complementary access to MixRank for one month. Take advantage of this!

The Interview

So, Ilya, a lot of entrepreneurs really struggle with paid advertising. And, we have no money! What are some common mistakes that people make when using paid advertising?

One mistake we’d made before was in trying to sell our product right away and then dismissing a campaign if the product didn’t sell immediately. For premium Saas products, in particular, it takes a lot of time for a potential customer to play with it and really see how it fits with their work flow before deciding to buy. A rule of thumb is that you need at least 30 actions before making a decision on a paid campaign. So, 30 conversions need to happen with a given paid channel before you can say what the conversion rate is. Be patient and don’t give up too soon!

What are some advertising channels you have found effective, and what are some you have found ineffective?

My past experience is in really big, expensive, paid traffic campaigns, CPC or CPM search campaigns. One of the things I learned the hard way (with MixRank) is that strategy really doesn’t work for B2B/Saas businesses. Why? Because there simply aren’t thousands of keywords about your product. Also, you’re going to be competing with big enterprise software companies that are spending millions.

Facebook ads, however, are really underused for B2B products because you can target by job title, work place, fans of particular publications, location, and much more. It is a pay per click channel but is not about intent, which makes it a lot cheaper. When I run a Facebook ad, I’m competing against local small businesses, so the traffic is very cheap right now.

I understand you’ve done paid marketing with bloggers. Can you talk about that?

Newspapers, blogs — any kind of content — is under-monetized, and writers struggle with monetizing. We would do sponsored reviews with bloggers. We would send them a unique link to our site, and they would write a review about our product and disclose, “This is a sponsored review. Here’s my affiliate link,” and they would link to our site. At the time, we didn’t have a paid product. We had a free one, but for everyone who signed up, we’d pay the bloger $2 or $3 per free sign-up. There’s some risk in whether the sign up would later result in revenue, so there was risk there, but it was fairly low. For bloggers, it was also low-risk. In contrast, if I approached a blogger and said that I wanted to buy banner space on his/her blog, the blogger would need to bet that my banner would make more money than what they were currently making. That’s a big risk in revenue for them. So, writing a blog post about us was low risk for them and paying per sign-up was low risk for us. Doing this was also really good for SEO, because the blogs we approached had been building up content already. Even now, if you search for “MixRank review”, you’ll find some of these sponsored reviews that are ranking near the top.

The second thing we did with bloggers was that we’d always look to see if they had a newsletter. We did the same thing with their newsletter, where they would send an email about us. The reason we wanted to get into newsletters was that it provided a big burst of traffic really quickly. And, they were mailing their best audience. Every single person getting that email about us was someone who was willing to give up their email, and that was a very high quality channel for us.

Illustration by Orissa Jenkins