5 Things I learned while indie hacking - Part 1

I am starting a series of posts titled "Things I learned while indie hacking"
which will document a bunch of random thoughts and learnings of my indie hacking journey. Some of these may work for you, some may not.

Topics include coding, marketing, sales and more.

So, Let's get started.

One - Build a free tool to boost SEO

If you are not good at something, try something else. I suck at blog writing -it doesn't excite me as much as coding but, you still need to grow your SEO traffic, isn't it?

So, try building a free tool that solves a problem that people often search for.

Head to UberSuggest(free) and see if there are keywords related to your field.

Here's my SEO result for the simple UTM builder tool that I built recently.

Two - Pay attention to meta tags

I have made so many mistakes with this. It is hard to get it right especially, the description tags. They can make a big difference with SEO results. Also, don't forget to include OG tags and optimize images for social media.

And wrong canonical tags can pretty much kill your search traffic.

Three - Keep improving user experience(UX)

Remove any kind of friction within your app as much as possible. I have redesigned and restructured one of my pages almost 100 times now. Your app will probably suck for the first few months but, keep iterating it and make it better every time.

Use Hotjar or Fullstory to understand bottlenecks and resistance within your applications.

Four - Cold DMs work

I guess you are familiar with cold emails. Try cold-DMs on Linkedin and Twitter.

It's spontaneous and you can quickly send your response to follow-up questions. Don't spam though.

Five - A blog post doesn't have to be very long

This blog post is not that great, to be honest. But, it does two things well: It solves a problem and is well optimised for search engines.

The headlines, the keywords, the images - everything is targeting search engines and it has only 300 words!

Here are the SEO results. It is one of the most visited pages on the blog.

If you liked this post and would like to read more such posts, please let me know. I have many more to share.

You can also follow me on Twitter(@byteblanq).