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28 Comments

500 Email List Subscribers!

Been continuously writing and sharing new articles over the past weeks and the email has slowly but surely ticked up to 500!

In no small part helped by one big Hacker News spike which got me about new 150 emails in 1 day :)

There's absolutely no organic traffic atm so having to do lots of manual sharing, which has been a bit tricky given I've been on holiday.

I think the email boxes at the end of each article and modal popup are doing a very good job of capturing emails.

Since I launched there's been 13.6k users. So 500/13.6k means that around 4% of people who visit the website end up leaving their email address. Sounds alright?

  1. 3

    Great content, liked the nike story a lot, do more like those

    1. 1

      Thanks Washington. Will do

  2. 3

    I'm honestly impressed by your work. I took a look at your website and it seems to me that you are not optimizing for SEO but looking more into writing shareable and interesting articles. Am I wrong?

    All the marketing gurus talk about helping your audience and writing great content but 90% of them write 2000+ words of fluff to game SEO. It seems to me that you are actually doing what they preach but don't do.

    1. 2

      Hmm, that's a really interesting point you raise. Yep, I have read a lot about longer posts about classic articles focusing on keywords.

      Here's my stance:

      1. SEO is a huge priority for my site (despite it being all over the place atm)
      2. But in order to have any chance of ranking I need some domain authority
      3. The best way of getting domain authority is by getting backlinks from good sites
      4. The best way of doing that is by writing high quality articles

      For example my Nike shoe article got rewarded by Hacker News. That got me loads of attention. That wouldn't have happen if I just wrote straight down the line piece focusing exclusively on optimising for a certain keyword.

      There's no point me trying to rank for a classic Neil Patel esque topic at the minute. Because it's really competitive and I have very little domain authority.

      1. 1

        I know about domain authority and backlinks. That's the reason why I'm skeptical that a new website can reach the first page of google. I could be wrong of course but nowadays I see almost exclusively websites with high DA and PA even for long tail keywords with little to no monthly searches.

        By the way, I shared one of your articles on a discussion on PH

        1. 1

          thank you!

          Hmm, interesting! If you watch @patwalls you tube videos where he goes through the analytics for Starter Story (e.g. this one) you'll see that organic (from seo) is the main traffic source.

          Admittedly Starter Story has been around for a few years now.

          1. 2

            I didn't see traffic pick up until late last year. So I worked with basically no google traffic for over a year after I put out my first content.

            1. 1

              fascinating. probably coincided with your DA getting boosted by backlinks etc ...?

              1. 1

                I don't know haha. I stopped looking at my DA a long time ago.

                1. 1

                  you're so zen. i like it.

                    1. 1

                      i dunon man.

                      ignoring daily analytics, twitter, email numbers is a superpower

          2. 1

            I am not an SEO expert so I could be completely wrong but I see your current strategy more effective even in the long term.

            Google is constantly reducing the organic reach adding more ads, rich snippets, answer boxes and so on. Plus articles that can game SEO require more time (2000+ words, keyword optimization, studying the competition, more images...).

            Also with the advancement of machine learning, I suppose they will soon be able to understand the quality of a post without external feedback.

            I didn't want to discourage you, of course, I was just saying that for me your current approach is great and for a new blog better than the standard SEO.

            1. 1

              interesting, and i tend to agree. thank you luqa.

      2. 1

        The article link on our comment is broken, it points to localhost.

        1. 2

          haha! fixed (developer at heart )

  3. 2

    Wow so fast! That’s awesome Harry!!

  4. 2

    Keep it up, the content is awesome!

    1. 1

      Thank you Ben! Means a lot.

      Hopefully there will be a few tips shortly which you can use for your front end jobs site. Have you had much successful marketing there?

      1. 2

        I've been reading over all your cold email case studies in preparation to start reaching out to companies to post jobs. I need to sit down and actually write the email. I think I've got enough traffic now via organic / social / content marketing to where it would actually be worthwhile for a company to pay. Just need to ask them to :)

        1. 1

          Great. Feel free to email me over your effort. Would be cool to see what you come up with :)

  5. 2

    13.6k unique visitors/users, or are some returning? If so, you have higher than 4%. Congrats!

    How long did it take to climb to that?

    1. 2

      Thank you! I think total users.

      Err, around 20 days since launch :)

    1. 2

      Thank you Rosie. Looking forward to listening to you on the podcast later on :)

  6. 1

    Well done! Looks like you're off to a great start. Site looks nice, too. :) Signed up.

    By the way... Seems like you're using Amazon SES for email delivery. Out of curiosity, what's your experience with it so far? Pros, cons? (Slightly off topic, I know...)

    1. 2

      Thanks @ptrei,

      So I'm using Email Octopus which does require Amazon SES set up (but handles all the hard stuff for you).

      And I'd say it's great.

      Pro's are:

      • Cheap
      • Simple
      • Does what it says (I find Mailchmp does too much now. I just want to send emails)

      Cons are

      • Doesn't do segmenting easily
      • It doesn't do really complex stuff (but that doesn't bother me at all)
      1. 1

        Interesting. I’ve never used Email Octopus but I’ve seen them mentioned here and there. Thanks for taking the time to reply!

  7. 1

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