Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Wordpress, SEO, the Status Signaling Loop

Let's start 2021 off with a bang. Here are the latest acquisition channel opportunities you can use to get more paying users:

• Want to go viral? How implementing "status signaling" in your software
• WordPress market share keeps growing in 2021. Learn how to take advantage of this.
  can help you unlock rapid growth.
• Want to rank higher? Why switching to a dedicated IP might be a good idea.

1. Why You Should Care That WordPress Powers 38.3% of the Web

In a recent Hacker News thread linking to W3Techs, users debated whether WordPress was superior to other competitors like Gatsby and Hugo, yet ultimately, favored WordPress over the two for one reason: WordPress has its App Store.

But don't take my word for it. As you can see, as of January 2021, 38.3% of the internet is powered by WordPress:

What this means for you: AppStores are still the only acquisition channel where "build it and they will come" still holds true. I've seen plenty of founders have success with it in my Zero to Users research. One of those people is Corey, the founder of KanBan for Wordpress ($1.1k/mo):

Part of what attracted me to the WordPress ecosystem is the WordPress plugin repo. Unlike the Apple App Store, there's a much lower barrier to entry and no new programming languages to learn.

All but a few of my customers came from finding the free plugin in the WordPress plugin repo. The plugin has been installed over 10,000 times.

And if you can figure out the answer to either of 2 questions below, you can tap into a huge market and get thousands of potential users:

• Can you publish your app, or a specific feature of it as a Wordpress plugin?

• How can your software be useful to the Wordpress ecosystem?

2. How To Implement "Status Signaling" Into Your Software

Show, don't tell: People don't wear a Rolex watch just to tell the time. Many also don't use Apple devices to just make calls. These pieces of hardware are used mainly for status signaling, among other things. Status signaling is a powerful buying motivator.

The problem: Software is at a crucial disadvantage compared to physical products when it comes to status signaling.

What's the software equivalent of a Rolex watch or Armani shirt? Yea... that's what I thought.

But some things are beginning to change. Take neobanks (a fancy name for online banks). Some of these banks are moving the card number to the back of the card:

The reason for this? Easier social signaling. People can now take a picture of their Visa and signal to others they're cool/rich/hippy/whatever-trait-the-bank-is-associated-with.

What this means for you: The original article lists more examples that could give you more inspiration:

• Razer cards where people can signal they care for the environment;
• iMessage bubble colors to signal belonging to a group, and so on.

If you can figure out how to also implement status signaling into your software, you can get more people to share it, which results in even more people seeing the software, unlocking viral growth.

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3. Study: Dedicated Hosting Can Increase Your Rankings

This is the conclusion of a recent SEO experiment on how shared/dedicated hosting affects SEO rankings. The first group of sites was on a shared hosting IP, with many low- or spam-quality sites. The second group was on a dedicated IP hosting. Guess which group got better rankings?

The second group.

The guys behind the experiment now did a part 2 of this study, where they went even further: They took sites on dedicated hosting and put them on shared hosting (and vice versa). Then, they waited for a few months to see the results which were quite surprising:

That sites that were previously on dedicated, but now on shared hosting lost their rankings. The sites that were previously on shared, but now on dedicated hosting, gained rankings...

What this means for you: Check who you're sharing your hosting IP with. Do you have low-quality sites as neighbors? If so - they might be hurting your SEO rankings.

Edit: This is from the first study:

10 websites were hosted on dedicated IP addresses using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 10 others were hosted on shared IP addresses that we knew also hosted bad neighbourhood type websites.

So these guys put the domains on a shared IP address they KNEW also hosted bad neighbourhood type sites. So this study doesn't say that shared hosting may hurt your rankings, but shared hosting with bad neighbors may do that.

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