SEO Project Marketing: My own experiment
I want to share a link building strategy I saw last week:
- Make side projects
- Host them on your own domain
- Get them in front of the press
The idea is Press exposure results in articles (and backlinks). And because the projects are hosted on your own domain any “link juice” flows to other pages on your website helping them rank better.
I came across it after noticing just how many side projects Kapwing's cofounders (Julia and Eric) were launching on Product Hunt. 15 launches in 2018 alone!
Did a bit of research and a lot of their side projects have picked up some pretty major backlinks. For example, in response to a Northern California wildfire, Eric made an interactive map allowing evacuated residents to see the status of their homes.
He then emailed the map to journalists covering the fire. And Kapwing was rewarded with backlinks from The Huffington Post, East Bay Times, KQED ...
My own experiment
So I've decided to give this strategy a go myself. The past week I've built a side project, Startup Gifs, and this morning it's live on Product Hunt.
Journalists browse Product Hunt for article inspiration. So if I do well there hopefully I'll be rewarded with articles and backlinks. Going to start sharing with some bloggers this afternoon.
Any questions / feedback hit me up! Will I earn any high quality backlinks? I shall let you know.
Hmm i am not sure if this is a strategy you are sharing with people here or are you trying to promote your new product hunt project?
I am not sure if Journalists really browse Product hunt an betalist or other similar websites to write about new idea, i feel that Journalists are always paid or having some kind party that would provide them with what they should write about!
Regards to journalists picking things up from Product Hunt. This is definitely a thing. Often directly, and sometimes indirectly. For example you might see something on Product Hunt and tweet about it and then a blogger might see your tweet and write about it. But Product Hunt is still the spark.
Just to give one example after @diannamallen posted Budget Meal Planner on Product Hunt it was featured on Mental Floss and Lifehacker.
This image shows all the backlinks Kapwing have gotten from their various Product Hunt launches. And 90% of the time Product Hunt is the spark:
Regards to myself "promoting my own project". Don't really have much to say. Fair enough. I post a lot on this forum. Sometimes it adds to the conversation for me to share the actual strategies I'm using. So if sometimes that comes across as promotional then so be it!
Yeah i agree with you that you might get good exposure and back links through product hunt, but the thing it's all about who hunted your idea, and if it was promoted to homepage or just got buried in page #123213.
This is why i think journalists would only check the featured products and they won't dig deep in the none featured products that didn't get much votes because no body check the pages other than the front page!
Think about it as the google page rank, but google would have a little fair algorithm that would give the chance to any website to rank on the front page if they have a good content, but for producthunt! its all about the hunter who added your idea, which can be considered as a journalist that won't hunt your idea unless he benefits from you or your team.
I built something similar, I didn't put it on my own domain, not sure if it would have done so well if I did.
The project was posted on a lot of sites all around the world including Japan, Turkey, France and Brazil and drove a ton of traffic and ranks well on Google.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
This can work as long as your side project is something that is relevant to your website.
For example, if you sell toys and your side project is about food, the links you gain won't probably be that useful (although still better than nothing).
From a ranking viewpoint, authority trumps relevancy every time, always has. Its great if you can get both of course, but the big authority links will move the needle more, even if they're not very relevant to your product/service. But remember you can also make a side project more relevant to your site by finding a tenuous connection, there's usually some kind of connection that can be made between 2 seemingly unconnected things - thats where you have to get creative.
This is debatable, I remember a Google spokesperson saying that links from high authority sites may be discounted if there is no relevance... But you made a good point about creativity, you can almost always find some sort of connection.
Your case-study gave me a BIG ah-ha moment, Harry. It’s a similar industry to mine but different demographics. Thank you as always for the value you’re bringing to the community, particularly as marketing is my achilles heel. :)
Cheers David!
I love the tweet Julia did about the article, "SEO is an art not a science". So good luck if you go down a more creative route with yours! And good luck
Hey Harry! I'd love to know more about how you approach sharing your launches with bloggers. I tried to get some press when building Blogcast and failed miserably 😅
I think a lot comes down to the product. You want something fresh, different. For example it's very tough to spread something like Marketing Examples round because to most journalists it's just a boring blog. It's much easier to spread an exciting B2C round
I wrote a bit about the process in The Kanye Story:
"Time to build my blogger hit list. I don’t really know what I’m doing so I start googling. 10 minutes later I come across this website called Buzzstream Discovery.
Turns out I’ve hit the jackpot. Buzzstream is amazing. You enter a search term and it spits back the names of all the bloggers who have written stories about that search term. So I enter “Kanye West”, filter “within the last 30 days” and Buzzstream gives me a list of all 440 bloggers who have written stories about Kanye West over the last month. These bloggers are my perfect audience. It’s their job to pump out, simple, funny, digestible stories about Kanye West and I’m about to spoon feed them a classic.
Getting the names is only half the battle though. I’ve also got to get email addresses. I find this website called Hunter.io where you type the name of any company and it tells you the correct email format which that company uses. Four hours later 220 emails are locked away in an excel doc.
I type up the following message:
wack on my headphones, and play through Kanye’s whole discography, whilst I send email after email after email after email after email. Go to sleep, wake up, and then I'm back commuting into London for a day's work."
You mentioned Kapwing (@jjejje) as your inspiration: their blog has had massive exposure on sites like Hacker News and their articles are shared all the time.
Most of what they post has nothing to do with their product and is more related to the lifestyle and challenges assocciated with tech entrepeneurship. A massive SEO question I've had for a while is how is it that their blog marketing strategy works? Is it:
1.) Through massive exposure, people eventually indirectly learn that Kapwing is a meme maker. So even if I read their blog to learn abour recruitment and fundraising - their product seeps into my unconcious (brand awareness). So when I do need a fancy meme generated, they are the first company I think off. I.e their blog is a massive long-tail funnel.
2.) They generate so many backlinks and authority through these lifestyle articles being shared, that it helps them rank higher for meme-maker related search words?
I would love to learn the logic of how their content marketing helps drive sales - as I understand it's their main traction channel. I wonder if you could shed some light on this with your access to tools and insight into SEO (could make a great case study, btw).
Really really good, well thought through question. You've kind of hit both nails on the head. in your explanations. And Julia has given her thoughts.
Ahrefs is a great example of content marketing which hits both 1 and 2 squarely on the the head. There articles are great for SEO merit but also they're writing about problems which their product solves. So people are reading the article and thinking, "I need to buy Ahrefs".
Look how many Ahrefs screenshots they include per article. For example this one about Keyword Research.
So the best content marketing achieves both. In my opinion:
Kapwing is more indirect. Blogs > SEO boost > Organic Traffic > Sales
Ahrefs is more direct: Blogs > Ahrefs product is amazing > Sales
Ironically, I wrote a blog post on how our blog contributes to SEO :) I agree with both 1 and 2, and there's a 3rd effect of increasing company legitimacy to potential investors and employees.
Hi Julie, thanks for reminding me about that article!
I suppose what I'm interested in is a more quantitative analysis: this is something that distinguishes Harry's content and could pherhaps be the topic of a follow-up blog post from you? (For example, your post mentions the side projects, but the way @harrydry has quantitively visualised them above is a lot more compelling and useful.)
For example, for your top google key word, what percentage of backlinks does your blog account for? Also does this juice come from a few articles or is there a pareto law, with a few articles earning most of the links?
Obviously, you don't have to share sensitive metrics but some numerical analysis would be fascinating and provide some evidence-based guidance for the rest of us. Just as in an analagous manner, posts that share concrete revenue metrics are a lot more interesting that general posts about growing revenue.
In the article, you mentioned that content strategy is an art not a science. Is that still the case, or have you statistically analysed previous performance to improve your content strategy? For example, have you found certain topics work better than others or do you just follow your interest?
Looking quickly with my own SEO tools:
Good research. My research showed similar. Definitely lots of ways of building backlinks. I zoomed in on this one. But yeah, a more holistic write up (like what you provided) is interesting