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19 Comments

Ask me about growth or SEO | I've reached $1.5k+/day

In celebration of the launch of https://www.problems.com, I'm inviting you to ask any question about growth for your startup or any questions you're on stuck on at all.

I sold a music search engine years back which reached 10k unique visitors/day and I've done multiple content sites which ranked #1 for many competitive keywords. I also reached $1.5k/day on my finance content news sites, and $1k/day in recurring subscription on a streaming video site as well.

I'e also hit $180k revenue in one month with dropshipping + fb ads + influencer ads.

Feel free to upvote or leave a comment if you find this helpful.

  1. 15

    Would be curious to know how much did you pay for that domain 😅

  2. 2

    Why fb ads for dropshipping over SEO growth?
    That leads to a bigger question - do you start with a marketing strategy you know will work well / you're good at, or do you cater the approach to the idea?
    Which areas do you outsource?

    1. 2

      From my limited knowledge DS stores die quickly, before SEO even has a chance to do its magic.

    2. 1
      1. FB ads allows you to see results right away and you can measure how much you spend vs. how much you can make.

      You can quickly cut out adset targeting that don't work (interest, age group, etc) and scale the winners.

      SEO is time consuming and expensive. It gets exponentially harder when you're on the first page and to get to top 3 is hard and expensive, and the only placements that matters.

      SEO should be a latter stage strategy after you've exhausted paid channels and proved they work.

      1. I have a blueprint that I follow for clients or my own products. I think every marketer follows the same way too. Assuming you have a desktop product and not mobile app,

      You want to start with proven digital marketing channels like

      -Adwords paid search
      -Adwords display network

      Then once you see those work well, you want to test channels like Facebook Ads.

      Other channels you may consider could include Twitter, Pinterest Ads (depending on demographics), Youtube display ads.

      You want to figure out which channel works well for your specific products. Try to spy on your competitors and see where they are.

      SEO should be the last resort since it requires constant investment over a long period of time.

      1. Outsource - I outsource repetitive tasks such as guest blog post outreach and anything where I can give specific instructions. FB ads has custom rules, so you only need a VA to help with creative uploading, etc.

      2. For startups I always recommend channels that don't cost money. Think about your favorite forum, FB groups, friends, influencers, etc.

      What's your project or company about? What challenges are you seeing?

  3. 2

    Low hanging fruits for growth with a small budget?

  4. 1

    Hey! I'm really curious about the music search engine. Could you give us some tips on how you grew the traffic there?

  5. 1

    The launch of problems.com © 2019? 🙄

    1. 1

      I've been focused on engineering for the site for the past 2 years. It was hard finding a technical co founder in SF so I bit the bullet and paid some offshore devs. I'm starting the marketing journey only the past couple months! Thanks for asking.

        1. 1

          What does your comment imply? exactly what I'm thinking?

  6. 1

    Hey thanks a lot for your help.
    How would you do SEO for a site without a lot of content ?
    My website https://sheetsms.xyz is mostly a description about a tool for Google Sheets.
    I am not sure how I can really do any SEO since there is not a lot of content.

    1. 1

      Nice site.

      1. Make sure your on page is good.
      2. Get your page speed score to A.
      3. Build backlinks from other sources, guest blog posts, etc. I recommend running ahrefs.com on your competitors.
      4. You should create a blog and post content there. Every client that doesn't have a blog, after we added a blog and keyword focused content, we started seeing good results and incoming targeted leads.
  7. 1

    I’m trying to reach bloggers who have a little technical knowledge but aren’t comfortable with design. I’ve built a tool to automate their social images for sharing on Facebook and Twitter, Mugshot Bot. How do you suggest I find them and ask about their current problems to see if my product is viable?

    1. 1
      1. Get Scrapebox
      2. Run scrapebox + with proxies and capture the top 100 sites for each vertical you're targeting. Use footprints that indicates they're on Wordpress. Such as: "inurl:wp-admin.php"
      3. Run a bulk whois look up and/or get some VA's to find the contacts and place it into the sheet.
      4. Run Mixmax + gsuite apps to mass email these potential audiences. Ask them if they want to use your software for free.
      5. Rotate domains each time you're blocked.
      6. Out of 100 people you message, 1 should be interested.
      7. Out of 100 interested, you should get 1 paying customers.

      Keep repeating the process til you build a $10k/mo business. This strategy never fails. You just need to have a product that people want.

      Consider building a wordpress, and shopify plugin (if it makes sense) as well as you will get placement in their stores.

  8. 1

    How do you get your initial backlinks? Tell me if the following is wrong:

    1. Established sites are reluctant to link to small blogs because outbound links to non-established websites are bad for their SEO (somewhat). For example my site's Ahrefs DA is ~5.
    2. Because there isn't that many backlinks to my site, it's really hard to beat #1 / I'm not really seen as an authority in my niche. One of my posts has gotten excellent feedback yet is still only ranking at #15 for the main keyword. This post lands about 50 visits a month and I consider it my best-performing post but I wish it could be on page 1, competition is not even that bad: https://taptimize.com/blog/increase-shopify-page-speed

    What do you think people in my situation (I'm sure a lot of indie hackers) should do?

    1. 1
      1. Not bad to link to a smaller site. But typically they don't want to help smaller sites because if you link to them, it doesn't help them out. Sometimes these big sites may ask for payments.

      To solve this, you should create really good or unique content that will incentivize them to want to link to you.

      1. #15 is great! I see you're 2nd page for:

      shopify breadcrumbs
      shopify meta tags
      meta keywords shopify

      I see you have a search engine ranking position tool. There's a great case study on FB of some guy who launched a service like that.

      The trick you should do is mass reach out to a lot of blogs. Look at my prior post above about using scrapebox + whois look up + mixmax. And offer them a free trial or "Free limited full version" if they link to your site. It's a numbers game. You'll start to see more links.

      Feel free to reach out if you have anymore questions.

      1. 1

        Thanks @knowledgeseeker I had not considered that strategy at all. If you have the link to the case study I would love to check it out.

        Will read your post, too :)

        1. 2

          It's this one!

          Get Scrapebox
          Run scrapebox + with proxies and capture the top 100 sites for each vertical you're targeting. Use footprints that indicates they're on Wordpress. Such as: "inurl:wp-admin.php"
          Run a bulk whois look up and/or get some VA's to find the contacts and place it into the sheet.
          Run Mixmax + gsuite apps to mass email these potential audiences. Ask them if they want to use your software for free.
          Rotate domains each time you're blocked.
          Out of 100 people you message, 1 should be interested.
          Out of 100 interested, you should get 1 paying customers.
          Keep repeating the process til you build a $10k/mo business. This strategy never fails. You just need to have a product that people want.

          1. 1

            hey @knowledgeseeker i like this idea.... what's the way to best way to "inbox" emails... ? think this would help so that you dont' have rotate domains? https://www.warmupinbox.com/

            I'm not very technical

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