Hi!
I’m back with lots of news for you all!
We recently switched to writing this blog post once a month so we will all inevitably have a lot of news. If you know how the startup world works, you won’t be surprised to hear that things can easily change even from one day to another haha
Well, since the last time I’ve updated you all, my role has changed a bit. Officially, I am now the Head of Growth both at Plant Sumo and SERPWizz. In a nutshell, my tasks are
My role is very similar to what I was doing at the beginning of my time at Pearl Lemon but now it’s more project-focussed. I am like a mediator most of the time but I often end up taking the initiative for new ideas to put into practice, I help when needed if someone is looking for specific information or material and I create processes and procedures to make things organised aligned in the team.
Some tasks differ depending on the brand that I am working on. For example:
Plant Sumo is growing fast and every week we can see big improvements. Clients are impressed and satisfied and this feels amazing knowing where you started. And especially WHEN you started – barely 6 months ago!! Ian is our new Sales & Business Development Director: he has added great value to our business and since day 1 he has shared a lot of ideas, spreading good energy and finding new partnerships!
Working at SERPWizz has been like being on a roller coaster. I’ve officially joined the team when we had just launched our SEO tool on Pitchground with lifetime deals on offer. You can imagine that at the moment of a new launch: things are crazy, customers are bombarding you with requests and only then, we realised that still a lot of things had to be fixed. We’re actually trying to take advantage of this time, with the exposure of a famous platform and the significant feedback from our customers.
While adjusting as many bugs and errors as possible with the technical team, we’ve taken the opportunity also to improve team organisation and communication. It’s been challenging at times, but I can see the potential that SERPWizz has!
Besides these big projects, I have also “unofficially” been involved in other brands and tasks. Pearl Lemon Properties is one of them! We have built the website months ago but only now we have registered the company and are starting to work on it for real. A new team has been created, the first lead generation campaigns have been launched and the first steps have been taken to make this new business a great success! In this field, I have mostly been a coordinator and have actively helped only when needed.
It’s a field I am not too familiar with but I am really excited to see this take the flight!
As if this wasn’t enough, we’re also planning on building a new SaaS tool that will help users create email campaigns and run email warmups. It’s called sendkoala and soon the new website will be live!
At sendkoala, I’ve mainly helped with constructive feedback on the wireframes of the projects and HR tasks such as looking for agencies of web agencies that will work on the back-end design and coding. This time things will be different: instead of starting a partnership as Pearl Lemon has done so far, we will hire an external team just for the project and 3 months post-launch.
Talking about HR, I’ve been back at working on training materials too. In particular, I’m going to check everything that we already have, see what is missing and what should improve. Oh, I’m sure this is going to be a very long task, I just hope I can finish it at some point! We have A LOT of training material! We definitely can’t complain about that lol
With things changing in the team and Deepak looking for people to deal with clients and replace him in that position, I’ve helped by giving feedback to a few team members who will become the new Account Managers. It’s been fun and they all said my help was useful when I hopped on a call, played the role of the customer asking a lot of questions, and eventually gave honest feedback.
I’m currently building a CRM course that I think will make a difference for anyone starting to deal with clients!
Last but not least news to share (drum rolls please…) I’ve started building my online branding and portfolio related to my experience in HR!
The three of them were great experiences and even if I know I can improve some things, I’m proud of how they went and I think it’s a great start!
If you watch/listen/read any of them, feel free to let me know what you think about it! Honest feedback please! Deepak will share his next week, I can’t wait to be brutally criticised haha it’ll be useful, I’m sure of it!
It goes without saying that this month, like all others, I have learnt a lot and I am so grateful for it!
I warned you that I had a lot of news to share, I hope you enjoyed reading about it I’ll catch up with you all next month!
Ciao for now,
Federica
The post Weekly Partner Update 30 – Federica (HR Success Manager) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-30-federica-hr-success-manager/
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Long time no see guys! If you’ve been following my posts, you know that I was timidly taking on new PR tasks and had worried about getting my first media mention. Just a few weeks later and I’ve got seven media mentions! (Some of them are pending haha.) I’m so pleased that I said yes to this opportunity, I never would have built these relationships if I hadn’t. At the moment I’m focusing on website copywriting. I actually find it quite hard, especially as the design of a website influences how the text comes across so much. Sometimes I write something, see it go live, and then think that the impact has changed slightly, but I get better and quicker each time I do it, so it’s always getting better!
The biggest thing that I’ve learned doing PR is that people LOVE METAPHORS AND STORIES. They help you to understand complex things and people relate to them really well – so journo’s love them. If I can include a metaphor/story in a pitch, I will! I’m really pleased that the content writing team has expanded recently, I feel like I have a big family of content team members behind me now What’s Coming In The Week Ahead:
Ciao, for now, my lovelies, see you again in April The post Monthly Team Member Update #4 – Amy Swain (Content Writer & PR Partner) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/monthly-team-member-update-4-amy-swain-content-writer-pr-partner/ Another Sunday, another blog post.
Granted, these have moved to monthly rather than weekly now, I have finally remembered to set a recurring reminder to do this either the third or fourth Sunday of each month.
Life has been fairly hectic since my last post back in mid February.
The fine art of balancing a new born, a toddler, work, and school is definitely an art. Daylight savings has put a definite hiccup in the routine though. The kids are now an hour off of the usual as they have not adjusted yet and it has been a week now.
Being back to writing is exciting for me as I forgot how much I enjoy it and how many times I had to push it back because other high priority admin tasks would pop up.
The biggest lesson I have learned, well continue to learn, is how to find and best implement the use of work blocks to have the most effective work times. There seems to be two blocks of time that Charlotte will sleep for 90 minutes and two blocks she is willing to sleep in my lap for up to an hour. This means I have four total sessions I can split between work and school when I am alone. Late afternoons I may be able to get my sister to hold Charlotte for a bit, but usually most of that time is giving Todd his own attention and any housework that is needed. Days still feel stressful, but it seems mostly driven by me still adjusting to the new sleep routine or lack thereof.
On good nights we wake up about four times between 9 pm and 7 am. If I am lucky, Todd will sleep until 630/700 and then my sleep is not interrupted too much. I may be back to NEEDING two cups of coffee in the morning, but I am hoping this is the last week I need to adjust to nights of “power napping.”
As far as lessons within Pearl Lemon, I am working on trying to write my Kemistri posts a bit faster. I am back to having an understanding of the topic a bit more, so it is easier to write as I connect pieces, so I no longer need to spend so much time researching to understand first.
The last few weeks we have also made a large switch at how weekly team meetings are held. I am enjoying the more interactive training sessions compared to the usual round robin of team updates. The post Weekly Team Member Update 47- Lydia Sims (Head of Internal Growth) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-47-lydia-sims-head-of-internal-growth/ Hello dear readers! It has been a while, hasn’t it? How have you been? Good, I hope, especially now that the lockdown has an end on the horizon! Maybe still a bit murky, but you know.. Better than nothing So what have I been up to recently, you ask? Lots. Lots and lots and lots lol I mentioned in the last post that I would be doing more PR work, and I am riiiiihgt! It’s been exciting to learn how to pitch people and help Pearl Lemon get more exposure in the world. I am happy to say that one pitch is already live here, and a couple more are on their way! It’s gratifying to see my work produce a tangible result!Team meetings have still continued to be one of my favourite parts of the week because I get to see my team and catch up with them (when the CEO isn’t looking , haha) Giggles in the team meeting I’ve also been doing more writing. Specifically, more long-form internal posts! This is really cool because I get to flex that creative bone that I have and do a lot more in-depth posts. Some are software reviews and others about more technical topics like improving your marketing strategy, google search console and most recently, Video SEO! You can catch these blog posts as they pop up on our website. It’s me! I can’t lie and say all of this work has been easy, but it has definitely helped me get better at writing, better at solving problems and keeping organised. Last week and this week (will be) are especially busy as I’m slammed with more work at my other job. I still need to work on improving the confidence I have in my work. Everyone (mostly haha) say I do a good job of whatever task I take, and I do realise that I am competent, but sometimes it just doesn’t communicate in my head lol. I’m glad that I’m gaining some of that confidence while I work at Pearl Lemon. For now, I have a lot more work to do, so I will catch you, folks, later! Have a lovely start to the spring, and let’s hope we can all see friends and family soon! Nelly The post Weekly Intern Update #5 – Nelly (Content writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-intern-update-5-nelly-content-writer/ Hello everyone, I’m back again and very excited to share my experiences at Pearl Lemon. Today is 05th March 2020 and I’ve been a part of Pearl Lemon for 42 weeks. I’ve started to work more on the email campaigns enhancements and auditing this week, as we’ve paced up the outreaches aggressively. There are numerous campaigns running on Pearl Lemon’s Mailshake account. Of course, there are some not very well-performing campaigns but the majority of campaigns are successful. As an SEO agency, we start to try different campaigns to adapt to market trends and for the same, I’m trying two new campaigns based on AIDA, targetting the irregularities in a website and another is the Error Message Marketing campaign, I’m very curious how these gonna perform as they are unique and very personalised. Dee brought a couple of new tools, as usual, I’ve got the first hands one is a Learning Management & Subscription System which we’re trying to use both on Pearl Lemon, as well as Plant Sumo, another tool is an email deliverability tool, which’s gonna make sure that the cold emails land in the inboxes using AI and other tool is a grammar checker. Social media something we didn’t focus on at large and we’re trying to do that now, targetting Ads on Facebook, outreaching interested people on Instagram and Twitter using automated tools and the tools I’ve been using for the automated outreach looks promising but time tells the conversion rates, of course, I’ll update in the next blogs. There’s a lot of buzzes happening the week in the company as a couple of new joined the company for Plant Sumo & Pearl Lemon mainly. The bigger thing is our SEO Saas Serpwizz is launching this week Well, that’s it for this week. Catch you next Friday, until then stay safe and will keep posting further updates (TJ at Pearl Lemon) Thanks!
— TJ The post Weekly Team Member Update 43 – Tenny (Head of Research) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-43-tenny-head-of-research/ Heyo,
I’ll try to make this update quite short because my eyes are begging me to get away from screens but I have a few things to say, so here’s me trying to be as clear and concise as possible!
Monday morning I get started on my day focusing on the two big projects that needed more work:
Monday afternoon Something felt off and I had been trying to set up a call with Deepak since last Thursday to get his feedback on these projects.
On Monday, we were supposed to have a team meeting with Pearl and Giulia too but unfortunately, they couldn’t make it so I ended up doing a 1-to-1 call with Deepak because I didn’t want to put this off anymore. The girls and I had already discussed a few points on WhatsApp so I tried to report their thinking too. Plant Sumo Italy seems like a great project but the timing probably isn’t right. Even if Covid-19 forced the Italian population to choose the delivery service way more often than before, the food and beverage industry is going through a significant crisis and opening a new business now wouldn’t be that easy. Not to mention that in Italy there is way more bureaucracy and laws to deal with than in the UK, so we expected things to take way longer than it took us to launch Plant Sumo in London.
There are also other reasons why we were unsure about the overall project. But long story short, Plant Sumo Italy is now put aside for a while.
When it was time to discuss Pearl Lemon Academy, I showed Deepak the sales funnel that we’ve built and we both agreed on the fact that it wasn’t bad at all! However, we were still not there and Deepak realised it was better if we put this on hold until he builds a sales funnel from scratch and then can share his learnings with us.
Yes, we stopped everything that I was working on. But our decisions were made on logical reasoning and, even if it is a bit disappointing not seeing the results we wished and worked for, we’re happy to take the time to do things right. We’re glad we got this unique opportunity to experiment with things in the field and we’d love to start working again on Pearl Lemon Academy as soon as we have a clearer direction to follow.
In a matter of minutes, I had no more tasks to do apart from everything that is related to HR and that I am still involved in. I’ll be honest when I say it didn’t feel too bad and I was curious to see what I was going to be focused on from that moment on.
Tuesday felt like a fresh start at Pearl Lemon.
As always, you go from “uh, I don’t have much to do” to “I am swamped with things” in half a day (or less!) haha I was ready for it! At Pearl Lemon, there’s always A LOT to do, you just need to ask a few people and they’ll be happy to share their work.
I’m not going to list out everything I had on my new to-do list, but these are the two branches where I’ll be working on the most:
Serpwizz
Plant Sumo
Deepak told me he wants me to be
I’m quite happy with the new plan and there’s clearly a lot to produce, work on, build from scratch, and adjust. It’s like a new adventure and I’m curious to see where this will go.
I lied, this weekly update was actually quite long and I would still have more things to say but I’ll keep them for next time.
Well, at least I hope you enjoyed reading my blog!
Until next week! Ciao,
Federica
P.S. This is me and my puppy waiting for people to join calls
The post Weekly Partner Update 29 – Federica (HR Success Manager) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-29-federica-hr-success-manager/ Hello everyone, I’m back again after a couple of weeks off and very excited to share my experiences at Pearl Lemon. Today 26th February 2020, I’ve been a part of Pearl Lemon for 42 weeks. It’s been 05 weeks since my last update blog, couple were due to a change in the pattern of outgoing blogs and another couple where my hands were off the keyboard, which gave my PC a rest at the least (lol). Since my last update, there were many changes in the team people who came in and out. I got a new Bangladeshi analyst in my team, he’s doing pretty decent work now. Oh, I didn’t share the mini team’s official pattern, here it is. Well, a few things I’ve been doing haven’t changed a lot, there are multiple lead generation, PR and SEO outreach campaigns running, which are yielding good results, one of such is the Interview campaign for La Dolce Studio the results were evident within the first days of the campaign and the responses were refreshing after all the technical ones. We’ve got a couple of new tools on board and they are promising(at least in the initial days), NIchesss is one which I’m liking more and I think it’s gonna go big. I’ve got a scraping tool for Insta which is working fine and reached my expectations. Direct social media outreach via a couple of groups have given us a good success rate for an SEO campaign and we’ve also got partners from that campaign. Some of the tasks I’ve been working on recently are,
Icy leads turned out to be more powerful than I expected, it has a long list of features that makes my work simple but the problem with Icy leads is that the data is not totally reliable with skimming. Now, I’ve got training for Zapier and I’m able to set up even more complex zaps. Well, that’s it for this week. Catch you next Friday, until then stay safe and will keep posting further updates (TJ at Pearl Lemon) Thanks! — TJ The post Weekly Team Member Update 38 to 42 – Tenny (Head of Research) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-38-to-42-tenny-head-of-research/ Hey all,
I started the week being extremely tired and looking forward to going back to the weekend mode but actually, after Monday, days went by quite quickly! In the past few days, I’ve worked on tweaking things on the three landing pages that we have built for Pearl Lemon Academy. They’re all part of the same sales funnel which has companies going digital as the target audience.
When you’re building something from scratch, you’re most likely going to take longer than planned to finish things because of the numerous unexpected issues that you’ll have to sort. Problem-solving can be fun at times but also quite frustrating if it delays your projects too much. The silver lining is that you’re always learning and that’s the best way to do things because you’ll remember them more easily! This week more than ever I realised how important understanding the thought process of things is. This applies to different situations that I deal with almost every day. Examples include:
We’ve discussed this aspect during our weekly training when Deepak shared tips about project management. The learnings that stuck to my mind and that I find the most important are:
Earlier this week, I’ve also attended another training session about leadership and here’s what I’ve learnt:
Last but not least, this week I’ve started working on a new project and that is Plant Sumo Italy! We’ve already considered the idea of opening Plant Sumo in Italy months ago but then we’ve preferred to launch it in the UK first. This time we may take a different approach and the start was all about market research. We’re still unsure if this project will ever be launched – for now, we’re just testing the ground. I’ll keep you posted in my next updates!
My pizza is waiting for me on the table, time to go!
Ciao, Federica
The post Weekly Partner Update 28 – Federica (Operations Director at PLA) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-28-federica-operations-director-at-pla/ Bonjour my friends, it’s my third weekly partner update! If you have read my previous posts, you’ll know that I had some pretty ambitious goals during my first week. At that point, I was writing content for Plant Sumo. There were definitely challenges, but it wasn’t too far out of my comfort zone. I used to be a chef, and I studied history at university, so I am used to both food and writing. But I’ve always been really interested in PR, then I got the message from Deepak -> ‘does anyone want to learn about PR?’ Yes! So I jumped in the PR call and before I knew it, I had written my first pitch, agreed to weekly PR training and joined the PR team group chat…lol, things move fast here. I have very little PR experience, so you could understand why another employer might not give me the chance to show my PR chops. However, Dee really understands that with the right guidance, some trial and error and a bit of effort – anyone can improve at anything! I began my week with more formal training, and I’ll be writing some more pitches on top of my content writing responsibilities. It’s going to take a bit of adjustment and vulnerability but I know I can handle anything, whatever happens. PR is quite difficult motivation-wise because you can send off 10 pitches and not get responses from anyone, it makes you think – why am I bothering? Everyone says that when you get your first bit of interest, it feels amazing! I really hope that this will happen for me. I’m hoping to do most PR work for Plant Sumo and Resume Cats – because I understand those brands the most. Here is a visual representation of me doing PR – I don’t want to show you the reality, which is me on my sofa in my slippers. What I’ve Learned This Week:
One thing I really want (and need) to improve is my knowledge of SEO and everything else that I’m pitching for. Because I’ve been writing for Plant Sumo, I don’t 100% know what all of the other companies are doing, so it’s difficult to pitch them! The Week Ahead:
Reflections On Work So Far:This week is my first month working under Pearl Lemon, and I can’t believe that it’s been such a short amount of time! I’ve never settled in anywhere so fast, been trusted with so much responsibility or learnt so much so quickly. I’m unbelievably grateful for all of the learning opportunities I get here and for connecting with some of the most knowledgeable and friendly people I’ve ever met. Bye for now The post Weekly Partner Update #3 – Amy (Content Writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-3-amy-content-writer/ Hi everyone! This will be my second update since starting my position a few weeks ago. In fact, it might even be a month now if you include my trial week. The question that I will be answering is what have I been doing during these past few weeks. I have been focusing on guest posts and completing as many as I can. The topics for this month have been very different to some that I have written about before, which definitely makes things interesting. A lot of these topics, I’m not entirely used to. My background comes from a more cinematic sensibility. But I think I’m adapting fairly well. I have seen some of these posts published and had a browse. I have also shared these links to my family members and seen what they think of the work. Here is one I wrote about B2B lead generation.
When I’m reading these posts, I’m getting a better idea of how the whole business world works and communicates. I get to see real and live backlinks work into full swing, what products/services are being advertised on each site. It’s all good stuff. The style of writing seems to be different and like I mentioned before, I think I’m getting the hang of it. When writing, I always think about how the public are going to think about my work from their perspective. This means that I’m not only thinking about the brand or service but also the consumer. It’s a decent formula that I’m using. However, I am still making sure that it sounds fun to read and that I bold the right words. I have been introduced to other areas of the work including page optimizer pro, outreach processes and a few more. I have understood these services but I have yet to put these into full practice. We will see what happens in the coming weeks.
Thanks to some training videos that Deepak has published. I have been able to see these ideas into practice and have been making comments. With the comments, I try to make them feel authentic. Like, what did I really learn from this? I have a good think about it. So far, the takeaway has really been in the style of communication to clients. I never knew you could make each email funny, even including GIFS if you want too. As well as guest posts, I have been introduced to internal posts. In the coming weeks, you may see my name attached to a few more internal posts. Working on more internal posts will be my goal in the coming weeks. One thing I have learnt more about is time management. I think I briefly mentioned it in my last post, but I now want to make sure that I am spending a good amount of time on each task and not hours and hours. That way, you can be more productive and move onto the next task. This is still something that is in process and another goal I’m working towards. I’m using whatsapp 24/7 and always looking at additional tasks, however guest posts, internal posts and training videos are the three that I’m currently working towards. I think these are good short term goals to focus on at the moment. However, improving my writing is always going to be one of them.
At the moment, I think I have covered just about everything.
Take care for now
Sam
The post Weekly intern update 2- Sam (Content Writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-intern-update-2-sam/ |
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