In this edited excerpt from our interview, Neil talks about business development:
Three years ago, I pitched TechCrunch, saying, “I can help increase your traffic through search engine optimization.”
It took a while and they said, “Great thanks. We’ll consider it.” But they never really did. They didn’t really hit me up. They didn’t care that much.
Then I started working with ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, and a few of their other competitors. They saw how those sites’ traffic increased and they said, “Hey! Yeah, we’d like to do an engagement.”
So my original deal wasn’t really for the links that they gave me back to my site. I wanted the branding and I wanted revenue. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder, is well-known in the venture capital space. So what I ended up doing is saying, “Hey Michael, I’m going to grow your traffic over two weeks if you send a mass email out to all your VC friends.”
So Michael sent out an email to people like Josh Kopelman–founder or First Round Capital and the founder of Half.com before that–and he said, “Look what Neil did with my traffic. He’s awesome.” And he sent it out to quite a few VC’s, and what endedup happening is those VC’s mass emailed all their portfolio companies, saying “go hire Neil.” That’s how my business grew.
That was the main way I leveraged Michael. The link is great, and I do appreciate them linking to me, but that wasn’t the main thing I wanted from Michael. I wanted his connections.
The full program includes:
- Evaluations of sites submitted by Mixergy readers
- 5 no-brainer ways to grow your traffic
- 5 dopey mistakes that sites make
- Neil ripping on Andrew for now posting text transcripts
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