Whoa, oops. All right, recording, sharing my screen, all that good. I'm actually on time also, which is pretty good because I like really left making my slide deck to the last minute, so on the right side, I actually remember what I put in here. All right? Participants, mute, yeah, everything's good. I'm gonna get started here and let people join and listen to the recording later, as they will let me see here I am getting ready because I actually do have some asynchronous questions this time that I'll answer at the end. So news and announcements for September of 2024, this is a very light state of the business from a personnel and announcements perspective, but I did want to mention this. This has been something I've been discussing internally a little bit, and it's not anything official just yet, but I feel like letting the folks who are you know, onboarded authors and contractors and whatnot, know about this, probably sooner than later, is worth doing. It's not, you know, we might later establish some more, I guess, official like client policies about what we do and don't take on. But for the moment, suffice it to say that we're starting to shift the ideal customer profile a little bit in hit subscribe. And the best way I can explain this is to say that for a long time, we didn't have any positioning really. It was just like, if you want content, you know, for like software developers or data engineers or whatever. But over the last year, we have developed these practices as an organizational shift. So there is the programs practice, which is short for content programs, and that involves content creation. It's it's the side of the business that most of you doing, like contractor work and author editorial, QA, etc, are working on. And what we're doing in that practice, who is run by Eric g that is essentially providing complimentary staffing and setting up like full blown content programs, like brokering a guest blogging program the way, like DigitalOcean does, or, you know, just delivering high volumes of content or what have you. So that has become one practice, and then there is another practice, which is Melissa's who's on the call. And that is if the programs practice is like the human side of stuff, the human elements of content programs, the martech practice is the supporting tooling, so setting up analytics, doing technical SEO, potentially helping clients like administer CMS, things, et cetera, and that practice and the program's practice, it has become clear over the course of time, have different ideal customer profiles, and that's kind of started to drive a lot home in terms of who we want to be doing business with us. Now, as I get into the latter part of this where I talk about referrals, this is worth bearing in mind. So when it comes to programs, when it comes to doing content for companies, what we are learning is that the best clients for the business, at least. Now, this doesn't speak to if you're an author, you might want to write for some bleeding edge startup that's doing something cool. It's not that. It's more from a business perspective, who does it make sense to do business with? And the clients that fit into that bucket, I've listed some of them here. What you'll notice is that these are enterprise type of clients. They're larger, more established, stable clients, and they are the ones that tend to have need for, you know, doing 100 plus pieces of content in a year, or to have, like, big, audacious business goals where it's worth actually setting up programs and processes, installing account management, going into their slack because we are sort of jointly with these companies, defining and creating their content operation. So that has been something that's led to a lot of stable work. It's the kind of thing that it makes sense to bring a large community of authors to bear on. Where things seem to make less sense from a fulfillment perspective, is early stage startups that maybe don't have product market fit yet. Maybe they don't even have a product they're a pivot away from firing their whole marketing department. It's a very volatile environment, and what we're finding is now that we've segmented the business this way, that when we do fulfillment for those businesses with the big enterprise clients, it's a very predictable thing. That we can staff out for the course of the year and build an operation around with newer clients, bootstrappers too. But startups and their volatility, it winds up being, you know, here's a little bit of money to do eight blog posts over the next nine months. And by the way, the CEO is going to be arguing with the authors about literally every one of them, and from a variety of perspectives, that latter thing just isn't really worth doing anymore, so we are starting to subtly move away from that. We're not telling people no exactly, but we're certainly de prioritizing that kind of volatile early stage, sometimes organizationally immature business. Now, before you view this purely as a bummer, especially if you're an author. What we do, and we're even doing one of these today in this situation, isn't to say, like, get lost. We don't want your business, but instead to say, we can help you with some of these martech things. We can help you with strategy. But if you want to squeeze out eight blog posts over the course of the year, and you're worried about what they cost, and you want to really be in the weeds of them that is much more of a natural fit for working directly with a freelancer. So the idea here that I'm getting at is we might start to increasingly brief out a piece of content and then just put it out to you as the author pool and say, you know, please feel free to raise your hand if you're interested, and we'll submit a list of author profiles to this business, and then they may work with you directly. So it would be a shift to that type of thing where hit subscribe is acting more as a matchmaker and less running the content. Because unless we're in this enterprise space, the juice kind of tends not to be worth the squeeze to get account management and onboarding and infrastructure set up. So I won't go on in any more detail about that right here at the moment, but it's just worth bearing in mind as you look toward the future, and you might be wondering why we're working with some clients and why we're not working with others, or if you're thinking about referring someone to us and they're like, Hey, I just raised a seed round, and I have $400 a blog post to spend on Mark, you know? Like, it's going to be more likely if you know people at large organizations that have more substantial type of content needs, like, we need to produce 150 articles over the back half of the year. That's more of a better referral for hit subscribes, programs practice. So just as an FYI for anybody who is interested in that, oh, I should also mention that if we get a little bit more formal, like start installing minimums or anything like that, we will announce that. So you all know about it right now. It's more I am currently doing all of the sales. So it's just more about what I steer people to when I'm talking to them in the sales process, and I find myself saying and thinking at times a lot more frequently this year, like, hey, that seems like a great job for a freelancer. You should do that anyway. Moving on, this is my stock slide here for anybody that wants to be on the team page. If this is news to you and you are an author, editor, QA, person, anyone that is doing work with us in good standing, we are happy to put you up on the website. You can submit that to Gabby, and I will get it put up. I tend to do that in batches. So if you submit it to her and don't see it for a few weeks, that's probably why. And I believe that is it for announcement flavored things. Now for what's in it for you? Here is another stock slide that I go over every month at this meeting. And again, this is the referral program. So if you refer warm business to us, meaning you make an introduction, and we wind up doing business with that client, we will pay you 10% rev share of the first year's worth of revenue that that business brings us. So if you were to refer one of the you know, types of clients I mentioned earlier, like an Enterprise Client, to us, and we were to do $100,000 worth of business with them, in the year after you made that referral, we would pay you $10,000 that payment would come out in quarters. So we calculate the payment based on the money that we've received from the client in the quarter, and then we pay it out to you after that. It's probably worth mentioning that actually, because there is somebody who may or may not be listening that as we're inking some things here might have a pretty sizable. One of these coming a lot of invoice or a lot of enterprises will actually pay out next net 60 or next net 90. So even though we might be doing a substantial amount of business with them, hit subscribe, might actually not be collecting payment for a full quarter. So your bonus payout is reflective of when we actually received payment, not when we invoiced, just worth mentioning there, but we have paid a good bit of that out over the years, and we continue to do so. It is a nice way for us to get business. So thank you to everybody who does this, or may do it or try to do it.
So this month, in what I'm trying to. Here to make it easier for all of you to earn that rev share and refer business to us, I'm trying to come up with like, fairly concrete things where I explain how you might refer business to us. So this common referral scenario is top of mind lately, because with you know, both clients and prospects these days, I'm finding myself having a lot of conversations where people are saying to me, our search engine traffic is on the decline. Why is it? Why is that happening? What can I do to fix it? Etc. So if you hear someone saying this at any sized company, by the way, that is a good referral opportunity, because this can be fixed in a variety of ways, not all of which involve writing new content. So even if you hear a smaller, bootstrapped company or something that might not be a programs client, if you hear them talking about traffic decline, we're happy to help there, and there's a lot of ways we can do that. So anybody that says that to you send them our way. This one is probably easy to do from a referral perspective. Are you going to bring up a browser window in front of me. No, what even is this? Well, I'll do this the old fashioned way. So, oh, here we go. I already had a browser window open with this. What you can do here, about this is, if somebody talks about their traffic declining, there's a post that I recently published on our site that talks about what we do to detect and remediate traffic loss, and it's pretty detailed, so they might find it interesting, just in and of itself, but it also links to this dashboard thing that we're creating, which is currently an alpha offering that we're moving along. And what it's got in here is an actionable list of refresh candidates for the site. The one that you're looking at is for our site. Make me a programmer, and it is actually live. So you can go to this URL, and you can look around and poke around in here and see the actual refresh candidates in here. So if somebody is talking about declining traffic, sending them this dashboard with refresh candidates and graphs over time and performance against keywords might be interesting to them alone, but then there's also this blog post that's explaining it. So that's kind of an easy way to go and say, Hey, I know a company that might be able to help with that. If you kind of want to casually peruse what they're all about, check this out. So enough of that. Let me see I wanted to mention this. This is still ongoing, and I know some of you have submitted ideas for companies to do showcases about and I apologize for this. I have been insanely busy, and I am still the bottleneck on this I did a couple weeks ago, when we can start to take a look and like identify these companies, but I'm going to catalog them, and you'll all know, especially those of you who have submitted ideas, when we can green light to start creating some of these showcase files, pieces of content. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, is if you, as an author, want to write a piece of content showcasing the use of a tool. So I had, you know, mentioned Splunk, for instance, as an actual client, but let's say they weren't, and you wanted to write a blog post showcasing the use of Splunk, if it is a prospect of ours, or somebody we think would make for a good client, and you want to write about them, we will pay you your author rate and publish the blog post on hit subscribe and promote it, and also give you the rev share if, in some fashion that blog post, as it's getting promoted and they're getting tagged in it leads to a conversation in business, you will get the rev share for that. And even if it's not really an ideal hit subscribe customer, we would probably only do payments, or we would only do payments for somebody. That's legitimate prospect if you still want to write about some developer tool, even if it's not a great fit for hit subscribe, if you were to write about that on your own blog and get their attention, and then somehow that actually did result in business anyway, we would still pay you the rev share. But if it is somebody that we would think of as a good fit for hit subscribe, we'll pay you your author rate. Hit subscribe will become the client, and we'll publish it on hit subscribe.com and Tracy is the one who is running that. Does anybody live on the call? Have any questions? I did log a couple from somebody in Slack, but I'll give anybody who's live a chance to unmute and ask, I don't hear any of that. So I'll start with the questions I got in Slack. One is, does hit subscribe? Still do white papers? And if so, how do we work on one? Yes, we will do white papers. I don't know if we've got anything like that going at the moment, but so it's not unique to white papers, lead magnets, anything that's like a more longer form, more formal piece of content, product marketing stuff like that we do. It's really kind of in response to client requests. So most typically, it'll be a. Long standing client where we're doing a bunch of content, and they say, Hey, can you also do a white paper? And we will typically say yes to that, and then we will source that content into the pool the way that we would. And Angela, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that would just go out the same way that a blog post would go out. So you would just see that in the list of content that you could sign up for. Another question is, are we still brokering C prime courses? And secondarily, is that only for US based people, as I understand it, Erin told me today, we're not really doing much of that these days. I don't know if there's any like stragglers that we might source for them. It's possible the answer to the second part of that question is generally, historically, they have preferred US based authors for everything they do. I think theoretically, for a virtual course of all the stars align, they might consider overseas folks or non US folks. But from what I recall, that was very uncommon. So generally, it's largely US based people. And I don't know if there's going to be much of that coming. You know, we're we're fine with doing that for them when it makes sense, but I don't think we have anything like open and particularly warm there. And then finally, how can we contribute to make me a programmer? So for anybody that doesn't know, I think it was six ish years ago, we stood up this site, kind of initially, to try to prove the concept of just standing up organic traffic and letting it come, which actually worked pretty well over the years. It evolved into, we would do author profiles interviews there and other forms of content. So it's kind of a community site aimed at people that are thinking about getting into programming. We also treat it as a bit of a content lab, so doing refreshes for content marketing purposes there, and like measuring what happens. I threw a couple of, I forget what the tool is, like, a chat GPT pop up thing. Just wanted to see, like, how generative AI articles would rank, so I threw a few of them up there. And not that well, as it turns out, they made their way onto page one and then declined. So it's, it's this combination of community content and experiments. And the question is, how do you contribute to that? These days, we're not commissioning articles there for pay, but if you feel like writing there, it does have some domain authority. And if you were to put up a piece of content aimed at a less competitive keyword, it would probably rank. You could also promote it. So you're more than welcome to create content for it. Just, you know, I would say, Angela, what's the best thing to do there? Who should we be reaching out to about that? For authors that are interested,
I think people can just reach out to me first and then give me, like, pitch, I don't know, not pitch me, but give me the topics you're interested in, and then I'll take it to the team, and if we find out that it's a good fit, then I'll get you in contact with our editor who works with make me a programmer, and that would be Kristen. Does that answer the question?
Yes, I think so. I was Yeah. So generally speaking, we're not choosy about the content that's up there, meaning you can kind of feel free if you want to pitch an article you don't need to worry about it's not like submitting something to the new stack or something where they have a lot of editorial guidelines about what they want to see. If you feel like writing about something technical or semi technical, we will almost certainly respond with, yeah, go for it, and then Kristin will give it a proof for you, and, you know, help you polish it up, and then we'll get it published. That is all of the async questions I have, so I haven't seen or heard anyone on mute to this point, so I'm going to assume I don't have any live questions. All right. Cool. I will, you know, thanks everybody for tuning in, and for those of you watching or reading later, and I will catch you all next month, if not sooner, you.
