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How I Went From 0 to 142,263 Users in 12 Months
by
Stanley Yang
https://stanleycyang.com/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website
Nice work! But the part that gets me is the waiting a whole year to [maybe] get SEO results. I feel like bootstrappers are the least able to deal with this long wait. And on top of that we don't even have the huge budgets to hire writers.
Not trying to downplay your success btw, just venting my personal frustrations 😅
@ryanthemaker I totally feel your pain.
When I was starting out, I was writing 3 articles a day on my own on top of working a full-time job. It took everything just to ride through the valley of death, but totally worth it when you get through.
Once Google sees you as an authority on a domain, they're more likely to recommend your result down the road. The interest compounds really quickly.
^^ This. Keep your job while building your project. Once project income = job income, you can say goodbye to your boss :)
Thanks for sharing Stanley. Nice tips!
Love this. I was looking through a lot of case studies that showed people holding their jobs while side-hacking their dreams to profitability.
Highly recommend "The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business" if books are your thing :)
Great point. I think another problem is that even if you get 100k traffic there is no guarantee that you'll have the right product to sell to them. I have had pages getting thousands of monthly visitors with close to zero revenue. That adds to the frustration even more.
Yeah, this is true. What I'm realizing if you're hitting the right demographic is that you can still use those pages to build awareness and funnel them into articles that might be better "conversion" pages.
That or you can send them into your email list and warm them up.
You really have to add a lot of hooks in the article. I recommend checking out the DollarShaveClub blog, they are masters at this.
@stanleycyang - really good stuff there!
One thing I learned from my own SEO efforts to get traffic to my eCom site was that conversions were incredibly low from content traffic.
Meaning, I did really well in getting organic search traffic to the articles on the site, but the traffic didn't notably convert into sales.
The search traffic growth was impressive, and it made me feel good (vanity), but it didn't directly move the needle from a product sales pov. More on the indirect benefits below.
As you pointed out in your article, there are different types of searcher intent. I even mentioned this same thing in a post here on IH back in August.
If someone is looking to learn, they aren't necessarily in a buyer-mode. Also, there are additional nuances of searcher intent based on the article content itself. Those can further reduce the chance of a conversion.
Granted, when successfully and continually ranking content articles, it does have some somewhat intangible benefits, such as:
There are probably some that I'm missing too.
But regardless, thanks for sharing your insights -- and congratulations on growing the organic traffic of your site.
@iammike thanks for reiterating this point.
One of the biggest things to remember is that even if that user is NOT in the right state of mind to buy but is the right target demographic, try and get them into your email list with a good value proposition (as you mentioned).
A solid emailing list is an under-valued asset. It helps build your brand and remind them that "hey, I'm still here :)"
I also found that some of my best-converting pages were not the highly-trafficked pages but some of the highly targeted long-tail keywords.
Thanks for the encouragement and tips, google don't make things easy really, but it is always nice knowing getting it right is achievable.
Agreed, Google makes it complex, but if you serve the underserved you will win!!
Thanks Stanley! Solid advice here, and I really like
"Your goal when starting out is to aim low. I'm usually looking for opportunities below 5,000 monthly volume and SEO difficulty below 20. Look for keywords with a high PD (Paid Difficulty) and a low SEO difficulty because it means that advertisers are going after those words."
Continue the great work and wising you awesome success! 👍
Thank you for your kind words! Cheers to our success 🎉
"I dream of a world where people are all paid based on the value they bring versus the time they spend on something." - love this!
I've been writing for a year about building products but have paid 0 attention to SEO. Will be spending more time here - your article was a great starter!
If my goal is to revisit my archive of 50+ articles and make them more SEO-optimized, do you recommend a different set of steps? Planning to start with Ubersuggest
Your website looks phenomenal! Honestly, it is one of the best websites I've seen in a while.
In terms of revisiting your archive, I think that's a great idea. What you can do is think about:
You can go after the keyword: "why mentors are important" (1000 search volume)
You can redirect the traffic from your current URL to something like https://www.productlessons.xyz/article/why-mentors-are-important
The best part is, you'll end up grabbing all the surrounding long-tails like "are mentors important" etc., and change the content to be relevant for that query.
Go through the top-ranking web pages in that query, and talk about all the main points that they talk about, and then sprinkle more original content on it (skyscraper them: https://ahrefs.com/blog/skyscraper-technique/)
Let me know if this is helpful at all, happy to help you brainstorm!
Aw thanks!! This is super helpful. Followed you on Twitter, will follow up with any more questions :)
Great article! We're trying to up our SEO game for our data-stream builder right now and you provided a useful introduction in how to go about it. Best of luck with your next milestones!
Thank you for your kind words! I'm so glad this helped you out!
Great job, consistency is key. 👍
This is the truth 💯
Nice article, thanks!
Thanks for your support 💯
Great read mate! Thanks for the share, similar questions to the rest of the people.
On that note, have you done much around backlinking?
Hey @veebuv, great questions:
Amazing, thanks for the detailed response! V cool and I wish you the very best mate!
Genuinely hoping you get to that 10k p/m mark and share another post soon saying you did so in stylllee ;)
Boom! Cheers to our success :)
@stanleycyang Your website articles are packed with great knowledge! Will be giving it a read for sure!
I wanted to ask you one question - I've been focusing on long-tail keywords for my product ruttl lately. When you say target long tail keywords, do you mean I should mention them every-so often on my website or use them frequently in my blog posts?
Let's take an example of "what puppy food is best", you might structure your URL to be "https://YOUR_WEBSITE.com/best-puppy-food-ranked".
You will look for ways to incorporate the keywords into your Title: "10 Best Puppy Food, Ranked 2021" (Numbers crush for CTR)
For words to use in your article, find common themes that all your competitors are discussing and make a list of them. Apply the same terms to let Google know your result is relevant for your audience.
Once you apply these tips, you'll have to just put it out and wait for Google to rank it.
Thanks for sharing this, particularly the URL tip. I am working on it this week, will try to get those fixed!
Cool article - did you have in mind your niche and found a search term around that using NP’s tool? Did you decide on one search term or many?
Also, did you write your content based on the search terms or just alter it slightly?
Great question - I started with a niche in mind and started looking at all the keywords in that niche. I experimented with a lot of different long-tailed variants and created content around them.
In terms of writing the content, I would look at what the best-ranked articles were talking about and create writing points. Then I would fill in those writing points with my unique spin on it.
Thanks for those answers...this is really interesting to me.
What did you use to track search term ranking?
Could you give an example of you finding an article and putting your spin on it.
As you started to rank better in niches, did you focus on less niche keywords or did you just start naturally ranking better in those wider search terms without even doing anything.
I really appreciate all the answers. I just meant do you have a concrete example of a way in which you 'put your own spin' on an existing article that ranked well. Or even make up an example if that's easier.
This is a hard question to answer.
So you don't want to create "duplicate" content on the Internet. You want to create original content. So you try and find unique insights and values that people haven't done.
For example, for my other business, I created an all-in guide to help people understand how film payroll works: https://topsheet.io/entertainment-payroll
This helps you come off as an expert and rank for big "buy" terms.
Nice graphics and design. How did you think of Topsheet?
we can up with the business because it was a hard problem in a field where the competitors had low customer satisfaction. It became a good place to build a competitor.
Don't mean to downplay your traffic but there's a huge difference between 142k sign ups and 142k users visiting a website.
Usually "users" refers to sign ups.
An IndieHacker's goal should be to do something with that metric and otherwise, as you mention, it's a complete vanity metric.
We've had millions of users visit one of our sites over the years. Over 215k sign ups. And even of those sign ups I really only care about WAU or paying users.
Congrats on your success!