How I'm Compiling The Latest In SEO

Hi there! Who are you and what's your background?

My name is Saijo George. I am an SEO by trade, have dabbled in most forms of digital marketing but focus have been on SEO- both from a content and technical point of view. I run the local SEO Meetup in Melbourne and run a bunch of side projects like tl;dr Marketing and AllTheFreeStock. Over my 12+ years, I have worked through various agencies in Melbourne and inhouse roles on some really large marketplace sites like ThemeForest from Envato.

What’s your newsletter about?

tl;dr Marketing focuses on covering digital marketing news stories without the fluff. I add stories that I find to be interesting to the site and that gets sent out to my subscribers every weekday.

The idea is that with this curated list of stories other digital marketers don’t need to spend a lot of time reading through 100s of other sites and figure out what are the important bits. The newsletter does that for you.

When did you get started writing your newsletter?

I used to brief colleagues on what’s new in search through meetings and Slack/Skype messages. Over time I also give monthly talks at the Melbourne SEO Meetup on what’s new in search.

These sessions always got great feedback from others, so I knew there was an appetite for this content. Started brainstorming on how to do something with this, the name tldr Marketing sounded like a great fit and the domain was available and the rest is history.

It’s taken on many formats and designs over time. I have used services like elink, curated, getrevue, custom react solution, and now it’s on WordPress.

What are some of the difficulties you’ve encountered in running your newsletter?

Initially it used to take a lot of time to find and curate the stories. I have to read through a lot, find what is interesting, get it into the newsletter, publish it on the site, etc.

But over time I have custom developed various automations scripts, VA, scrapers, change detection services, etc. to speed up the process.

What does the process of writing your newsletter look like for you?

These days, I have a list of stories that I go through. Then with the scraper, I can click on the things I need to add and in most cases it’s added (some sites won’t play nicely so have to copy paste them) to the site and that generates the newsletter template that gets imported to mailchimp. Then I can have a look at it to see if it looks good and click on send.

What’s your favorite part about writing your newsletter?

Even if I was not sending out this newsletter I would still read through most of this content for myself, to stay informed on what is new in the industry. So it’s really something that I enjoy doing and now I get to build an audience around that hobby.

How do you grow your audience?

For me, the point of splitting away from a newsletter only offering to a website was that I can leverage SEO as a growth channel.

Other than that it has been cross posting to social media, most of these are automated now with zapier and such but it’s not to the level that I like it. A while back, Zapier stopped allowing users to pass @ mentions to Twitter but there are other services you can use to bridge that gap, it’s only just implemented and not fully tested out yet but initial results look promising. Next on my list is to optimize cross posting to LinkedIn.

Reaching out to other active newsletters in related niches and cross promoting with them has worked out well too.

What goals do you have for the future?

It’s not set in stone but I want to possibly look at starting a podcast around this, automate more of the process involved in this, etc. With digital marketing there are always new things around the corner so I am sure I will have new things to test out.

I had a lot of fun automatically generating Web Stories for the website content, I also want to explore AMP for Email to make the newsletter more dynamic.

In terms of monetization I want to see what are the opportunities out there to generate some revenue from this.

Where can readers go to learn more about you and your newsletter?

My personal site is over 8+ years old, so it’s probably best to have a look at the projects section to see what is the new thing I am working on. You can also find me on Twitter or LinkedIN.

As for the newsletter you can checkout tl;dr Marketing and read more about the story behind it here.