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📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: March 2023 Update

📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: March 2023 Update

What went right, what went wrong, and where we could use some help

March 30, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

What’s up 👋

It’s Clay.

Question for each of you:

How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Some of my friends are worried about my caffeine intake, and I’m trying to convince them I’m totally ~fine~. Let me know in the comments.

In other news, here’s what happened behind the scenes at Confluence this past month.

What went right:

Improved backlink profile with 1,682 new links within existing content. One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned since we started investing in SEO was the importance of backlinks: if you don’t have them, you won’t rank. They’re a part of Google’s algorithm that helps the search engine determine how useful your content is, and there are different types of backlinks with different ranks in importance (external inbound links being the most important since that means that other sites think your content is valuable enough to link to their own content). To improve the backlink profile of our site, we started using a tool called LinkWhisperer which scans all of your content and starts to make recommendations on which pages should be linking to one another within your site. It’s affordable and an easy way to get all of your content more linking.

Started creating 60-second crash course videos on popular terms in our VC Glossary. Our YouTube channel needed an upgrade. This month we started a playlist (VC Terms: 60-Second Crash Courses) to simplify the most popular terms from our VC glossary into bite-sized pieces. We’re investing into this type of content for a few reasons. Short-form content is here to stay, and we think all businesses should have some type of short-form content strategy. We also think that YouTube content has the longest half-life, and it is the platform that lets businesses create more evergreen content. Lastly, we found that Youtube videos embedded within webpages increase the search ranking for that page. If you’re wondering what software tool we used to make these types of videos, we used Synthesia.
Created landing page for our recruiting service. We’ve run our job board long enough to realize something non-obvious to most: hiring top investors kinda sucks. You post on job boards, share in online communities, post on LinkedIn, and hope that something good comes your way. The reality is that hope is not a strategy, and this spray-and-pray approach to hiring doesn’t result in great hires. That’s why we started our recruiting service. Confluence has become (what we think is) the best community of venture talent in the world. Think YC for junior VCs. If you’re hiring and looking to get in touch with the top VC and growth equity investors, you can either keep using the ways mentioned above (hoping for the best), you can rely on traditional recruiting funds (this is probably a good fit if you’re only looking for people with IB or consulting experience), or you can use us and get introduced to qualified candidates with venture experience. If you’re hiring and want help building out a world-class investment team, let us know.
Unique visitors from search is up 48.5% over the previous period. Investing into winning search traffic is a loooong game. We don’t expect to see the results we want for another year at the earliest. Feels good to see some early wins and have the work start to pay off. If you are starting your SEO journey, let us know what you’re struggling with. Maybe we can give our two cents on what has worked for us so far.

Started testing Google Ads for recruiting service. Our recruiting service is new, and we need traffic. We’re running Google Ads to get that traffic (and choosing Google because it’s the platform people are most-likely using when they are searching for this type of solution). We’re new to Google Ads, so we’re testing out what works. This will probably result in us lighting some $ on fire, but that’s the best way to learn (right?). There’s too much to cover here, and we’ll do a deeper write up once we have more learnings under our belt.
Started testing Twitter ads for newsletter signups. We’re also running ads for our newsletter, but we’re testing it on Twitter. We chose Twitter because Twitter users like free info, and we give away free info weekly through our newsletter (seems like an easy pitch). We’re playing around with targeting and creatives, but we’ll keep investing in this. If you’re looking to run Twitter ads, this was helpful for us to get up to speed and this is a good swipe files of ads examples.
Tested a new format for the newsletter with good feedback on the first version. A lot goes on over the course of a week. Most people don’t have time to stay on top of everything unless they’re constantly monitoring Twitter and watching the news (good luck explaining the ROI of that time spend to your boss). We thought it would be useful to recap the most important venture / macro events of the week and give our TL;DR of the situation. This type of content has become more and more popular (think Morning Brew, The Hustle, etc.), but we think that it can exist for every niche. The first episode had positive feedback, so we’ll aim to do it more.

Met with Confluence members in-person in three separate cities over the past month. I’ve been traveling (Austin, LA, NYC) and have been meeting up with as many members as I can. If you’re in Austin (Clay) or NYC (Tyler), hit us up.

What went wrong:

Open rates from email have been down over the past month. We’re looking into why this is the case. Maybe there was a Gmail update. Maybe people are busy with the banking system falling apart. Maybe our content has sucked. TBD.
We haven’t figured out the best customer acquisition strategy for our service businesses yet. This is part of the process. “If you build, they will come” pretty much never comes true, and all business have to either figure out traffic, or they fail. We’re testing different ways to build traffic to our offers, and this will take time to get right. Running ads costs money, and we think we’ll have to spend in order to earn for any service offering. We are also planning on mentioning our services more in our weekly newsletter and creating automated email campaigns, but this will be a slower way to gain traffic.
We’re spending a lot of resources on optimizing content for SEO. Ranking for content has become hard. Our process has been to use Surfer to find what keywords we can rank for, then create an outline, send that outline to writers, review their work, make tweaks, publish and share. Now we’re realizing that we should make and embed Youtube videos into these pages to increase CTRs. All of this seems burdensome right now, but we think that it makes our business more valuable over the long-run. The businesses that invest in SEO create traffic advantages that compound.