What are your favorite traction channels?
What traction channels do you like the most and how much time per day do you allocate towards making progress.
SEO
For me, SEO is one of the best channels long term. All these years on the internet I have never driven a ton of traffic from SEO but I am really close to breaking through with https://storycreatorapp.com. I just need to be consistent and do my KW research.
SEO Pros: SEO can drive tons of traffic of people with the pain point if your funnel is done correctly then these searchers can turn into paying customers. Most likely they will convert after a few visits though. This traffic tends to be consistent and can be a huge game-changer for many SaaS companies.
SEO Cons: It takes a long time to rank and you must have a fundamental understanding of how the internet works, plus an understanding of many little things like lighthouse scores, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, etc. It's important to have good tools like Ahrefs, this costs a bit of money. A lot of your time will be spent creating content and doing research. Then it's a game of patience and proactively sharing your content hoping for folks to share and link to.
Time & Energy: I haven't written as much content as I would have liked. Ideally, I would have had 3 posts per month since I started one year ago, which would total to 30-40 blog posts by now. Right now I have about 10 posts https://storycreatorapp.com/blog.
My current strategy is to follow through with 2 blog posts per week. These posts are related to the core value of Story Creator. I am targeting keywords with lower competition. After building a feature or enhancing it, I try to write about it while it's fresh. So I might spend a day on a feature/enhancement, then 2 hours finalizing it with an article. 2-3 days a week I like to enhance things inside the app, then 2 days fixing bugs and talking to customers. I work best if I can kill multiple birds with one stone.
Problems: The problem I am facing is the lack of an audience and targeted audience. I post on Twitter and LinkedIn, but the people who enjoy the content are mostly entrepreneur supporters and not customers. I also need to be more consistent and be better at researching keywords.
Ads
Ads Pros: Ads are a breeze in the wind when it comes to impressions. Dealing with all the hassle of the organic approaches don't exist. You just plug your copy and before you know it you've come across hundreds & thousands of eyeballs. If done right this is powerful. It gives you a larger sample size to test and to better understand who your audience is and what they resonate with the best.
Ads Cons: It can be scary to throw money at the unknown. It takes a solid understanding of funnels and how to optimize them through data. It can be a large chunk of information needed to absorb if you're a beginner.
Time & Energy: I've spent $20 on Quora ads
This drove 321 clicks and 55.5k impressions. That same day I made a sale, I didn't track if it came from Quora though.
Ideally, for 321 clicks I would like to make 3-4 sales for $20 ad spend at a 1% conversion rate. So for now I think something is broken in either the product, the Quora users I was targeting, or the copy on the homepage. I need to do more testing.
I've only spent a day on this. I plan to spend at least 2-3 days a week tinkering with paid ads and about $40-$100 per week dialing it in until I get the CAC right. Each day will be time spent learning by watching videos and reading books. Then immediately executing on those ideas and testing what works. Time will be spent on setting up pixel tracking and using that data to modify copy etc.
Direct Outreach
Direct Outreach Pros: It requires no cash and is simple to get started. You can research where your audience is and follow a straight ground and pound style, direct approach, no BS. This is great for building relationships and can turn into user interviews that then turn into sales.
Direct Outreach Cons: It can be dehumanizing to get rejected and ignored. It can feel like you're bothering people, most likely because you've encountered some people with an "I am too good for you attitude" that you have to plow through. There are many mental obstacles you have to overcome. You need to bring high energy if you're doing audio messages or videos. It's not scalable at all and feels like mundane work.
Time & Energy: I've stopped doing this as I don't find it fun. Since sales have slowed down, I need to hop back on this and try and get the engine going again. So my gameplan is to get back on this train and try this channel one more time with more effort. So before I completely rule this out, I am going to do 5-10 video messages to Instagram creators per day with a scripted message and quick product demo around the features I think they need the most.
I hope that helps. Those are the three main channels I am testing, some of the Pros I have found, and the Cons. Plus I share the time and energy I spend per channel to give context, I am always curious to know how much focus you all are giving to tasks per day.
I'd love to learn about your favorites, why you love and hate them, also how much time and energy you allocate towards them weekly.
I read this post and immediately checked my analytics, and SEO has been my best-converting channel so far.
Unfortunately, it's such a massive undertaking just to get the wheels turning on that.
Creating content is easy, but increasing page/domain authority and getting backlinks are hard as hell.
I agree. How do you go about getting backlinks and how important of a factor do you believe them to be?
Backlinks give you link juice, and I believe it's very important.
Most of my non-affiliated backlinks come simply from Twitter networking.
I'm fortunate enough that I rank #1 on Google for my chosen keyword for my product, Zlappo: "schedule Twitter thread."
It accounts for the majority of my traffic, and I get a steady stream of leads from it every day passively.
Hey a few thoughts on what you're building out
Ultimately you'll identify one primary lever that drives the majority of your growth - so it's fantastic that you're testing multiple avenues. You should also think at what stage of awareness you want to target your users. I'd bet SEO + ads will work well.
Do what you're currently doing, targeting long tail keywords and also, try deep linking capabilities in your app that are related to those key words. EG a page catered toward adding subtitles you should enable them to upload a video to add subtitles. Then after they've worked on the video, ask them to sign up in order to download the video. More time on page will help with SEO, and reduced sign-up friction will help with conversions. I saw that you created a kens burn effect - see if there's search traffic for that, built out a dedicated page, and make it easy to add that effect to a video from that page.
If the main challenge in scaling right now is users and not product, I might shift your focus to more SEO content creation over product enhancements.
Try google ads based on the same keywords you'd be targeting for SEO. This way you can show up above competitors like kapwing/veed/etc. if your ads are high quality and you're willing to pay.
I'd test how much a sign-up costs, and keep track of trial to paid rates. Ultimately if you find that you're paying $60 to acquire a customer and CLTV is only $40, it's not going to be worth it. What IS worth it in that scenario though, is the learnings from the customers. So you could think of it as paying for customer research. Given you're still ramping up, it'll be understandably hard to know consistent CAC and CLTV upfront, so just view these as experiments.
Quora ads are more text based, so your landing page needs to illustrate exactly how it works for the use case you're targeting asap. The more visual the better, especially for a tool like this. Make some estimates to check what's a great - good - bad conversion rate. let's say clicks to sign-ups is 2%, that means you've got 6 sign-ups. Now what's the trial to paid ratio, let's say 25%. So you'd get approximately 1-2 users. Is the current issue with the landing page -> trial or the trial -> paid?
Also you'll want to make sure your ad copy is pulling in the right users. Definitely try a few use case variants (is it for making talking head videos, podcast visualizer, etc. - what's the hook and the relevant landing page?). I'd say $20 is a pretty small budget to make any decisions off also, so ramp that up if you can.
I can see a few reasons why this would be challenging. 1) How do you target people that need a video editor - what are the signals you can find to target them easily/quickly? 2) What's the likelihood at that moment in time, they're looking for a solution?
Sales cycle is definitely not worth the effort for customers at this price point - however, this is worth it in the name of customer research. So if you're looking to learn more from your customers, definitely continue at this.
If you've spare $$, hire someone from fiver/upwork to handle lead generation since that's the most tedious task and definitely not worth the trade-off with developer time. The hourly value is probably just $5-10, whereas a (semi-decent) dev hourly value is at least $30+. You'll still need to double check some of the work, but it will save you from much monotony.
Ultimately, you know better than I your customers/where they live/what they respond to!
Think you're doing something very valuable for the community in sharing your story, so wanted to hopefully share something that's valuable for you!
SEO, not that im that good at it.
Backlinks are hard, I almost want to start a new side project that can have viral backlinks. Like a website embedded component with a link.
That makes me sad :( I can help with attribution. Check your DMs.