How A Gmail Tool Increased Our Blog's Content Output By 400%

Brett Lindenberg

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Published: January 13th, 2020

Hello, who are you and what business do you run?

Hi, my name is Brett Lindenberg and I run FoodTruckEmpire.com, a website about food entrepreneurship helping thousands of people start and grow food trucks, restaurants, and other food-related businesses.

Currently, we’re doing 300,000 monthly pageviews and we’ve been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, CNBC, and other Major Media Outlets. We are the authority in the food truck and concession industry.

We are currently using Pigeon to manage and grow our blog’s content output through outreach and publishing interviews!

how-a-gmail-tool-increased-our-blog-s-content-output-by-400

Explain to me your email and business workflows.

As an online magazine the publishes regular interviews, secures quotes from experts, and books guests for podcast episodes we are always reaching out to people by email and more importantly following up with these guests to get information in a timely manner for publication.

It’s not uncommon for us to send out 50 outreach emails in a day to contact new guests to feature on the website.

With a Gmail productivity tool called Pigeon, we can easily schedule our email outreach and don’t need to worry about following up with guests to remind them about deadlines. It’s a huge time saver.

Without followup automation, it would be impossible for us to manually follow up with all of our guests to get back to us with questions.

Interviews with entrepreneurs - an easy way to give readers great content

So what did these new automation result in? Increased content production.

We used to be able to publish 4 high-quality long form posts per month. Now, we can easily publish 4 - 5 high-quality posts per week thanks to Pigeon.

That’s a 400% increase. Readers love the interviews, they get shared on socials, and it helps build the Food Truck Empire community

You can have a look at our interviews section the type of great content we are able to put out on a regular basis.

Here’s an interview we recently did with a Kombucha business:

As a small business, automation is key

The automated follow up inside Gmail is really helpful. Can’t express that enough. Everyone says follow-up works, but unless you have a way to automate you won’t actually do it.

There are many times I think that we’ve lost someone when they respond to our automated 3rd follow up. We would never be able to follow up with this much consistency without Pigeon.

For example, we have a sequence set up that we send to our writers that will automatically follow up with them if we haven’t heard from them after the first draft deadline. This saves us a couple hours per day because of the volume we are doing.

Pigeon is just so easy to set up and use

Also, Pigeon is just super easy to set up because it just fits right into Gmail.

For me, if software is not easy to set up and use, I won’t use it. Pigeon is easy to setup and use, which is why we’ve continued to use it.

You’ll spend more time figuring out what to say in your follow up sequences instead of trying to figure out the tech.

Thanks Brett for the awesome interview! You can find Brett on Twitter and at his blog.

Check out Pigeon for Gmail.