2. Viral Platforms
CODES: They’re free, low efforts, aren’t dependable or scalable, and you have ownership.
You will gain big hits but when they’ve passed, you’re often left where you started in terms of audience.
Hacker News: HN is a community where you need to participate to get anything in return.
- Be as straight to the point as possible in your title
- Only post articles talking about brand new ideas
- Don’t post only your articles, also post other people’s articles
- Engage with people
- Post products in Show HN and questions in Ask HN
There are plenty of these types of sites on the Internet.
Producthunt is another one. It’s not a place to post once, but can be used as a real bedrock channel.
- Don’t launch on Producthunt from the very beginning. Launch there once you already have a solid list.
- Channel traffic to a landing page to capture email addresses.
- Be clear about who this is for.
There are also Pocket, Flipboard, Google Discover, etc.
Pocket and Flipboard enable you to save an article and come back read it later. When a lot of people save the same article, they feature the article in their newsletter which enables you to have massive, short-termed hits.
3. Social Media
Social media are great as they enable you to acquire social capital. However, you don’t control the channel.
Influencers
You gain followers by following influencers, commenting on their posts, and adding value.
Eg: if someone writes a book, you can write a review of the book or a Tweet thread, tag them, and they will likely retweet it to their followers which will enable you to gain followers. If you look at Naval Ravikant‘s account, he mostly retweets stuff other people write.
- Join small communities in the beginning. Getting 100 followers is harder than 1000, which is harder than 10 000.
- Only follow people that deliver value. Remove everyone else.
- Don’t be a company: people follow people, not companies.
- Stay in certain spaces, those that interest you the most, and build a name for yourself there.
- Get a niche. Be known for publishing only on a restrictive number of topics. It’s best if that thing is a Twitter topic.
- State what you tweet about in your bio.
- Update your threads: they don’t have to be sent at one time.
- Be retweetable: this means tweet things everybody thinks but nobody says.
- Engage with your followers.
Great if you do something niche and work-related.
You can no longer reach your friends on Facebook as Facebook asks you for money for that. The only way to drive traffic is to post in Facebook groups.
4. Syndication
Syndication is republishing content.
Medium
Medium pays you for the number of views you get (but in order to get paid, you need to first acquire 100 followers).
Always post on your blog first before posting on Medium!
And when you post on Medium, add your canonical link. The canonical link is the link Google should give priority to (the link of the article on your blog).
2nd and 3rd Largest Search Engines
These engines are Youtube and Pinterest.
The con is that making a video out of your article takes time. The pro’s is that they unlock brand new channels. Test each one one at a time, and invest in the one that seems to work.
The channel you will privilege will depend on your content. If you are already doing interviews, put them on Youtube.
If you have nice data snippets, put them on IG or Pinterest.
5. Targeted
These are places where you will find your “true fans”.
While Hacker News will bring a ton of traffic during a short period of time, these will bring little traffic over a long period.
Partnerships
If you have a newsletter, you can partner with a similar newsletter.
Guest posting
Great to get backlinks, but it takes an insane amount of time.
Don’t accept guest posting on your own publication.
Building relationships
You do so by replying and contacting the people you read stuff of on the Internet.
Groups (Facebook, Slack, Telegram, Linkedin, Quora)
Whenever you write about a topic, do a deep search to see where these people are hanging out.
Participate in the discussions by adding value. Answer questions, write comments, share interesting articles.
Track relevant keywords with Google Alert so you get an email every time someone mentions something specific and you can participate in the discussion.
(Not-so) Niche Forums and Communities
If you can’t find a community, build your own.
- Reddit is big: the front page receives 1.5 billion users per month.
- Reddit’s audience is critical: when you share a link, expect mean comments.
- Users want to stay on Reddit. They will rarely leave it. The idea therefore is to copy-paste the article in the post, then put the link to your site at the end of it.
- Reddit is specific. You have communities for virtually anything. A lot of tools help you explore which communities are related to which communities. You can use these tools for new ideas for content and new places to promote.
6. Paid Growth
One of the quickest ways to grow. To do paid growth well, you first need to understand how much a subscriber is worth to you, and make sure you stay below that price.
Linkedin and Google are expensive.
Facebook, not so much. Think about Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Finding New Avenues for Growth
Competitive research: searching where your competitors are targeting their audiences.
- Use F5Bot to search for keywords appearing in Hacker News, Lobsters, and Reddit.
- Do the same thing with SimilarWeb
- Use Moat and Facebook ads library to see which ads your competitors are running.
- Go through your competitors’ sign-up flow and look at the “how did you hear about us”? That will give you an idea of the marketing channels they are using.
Building resources: make listicles (12 best SEO tools for marketers) and contact people you include. They’ll be happy to share your listicle.
12 more quick wins:
- Add a trust bar (the famous “as seen in” bar).
- Incorporate testimonials from people
- Repurpose existing content
- Test your headlines
- Make your image recognizable: that means take care of your site branding so that it is recognized by looking at the image.
- Make it easy to share (tweet your articles yourself, with a quote).
- Quote your own piece
- Track your own content with F5bot or Syften so when someone mentions you somewhere on the internet, you know and can join the conversation.
- Channel your inner guerilla marketer: do real-life giveaways, not everything needs to be digital.
- Be human: your readers are also humans. Ask them to share, have some humor, etc.
Small Stuff
Things that don’t move the needle.
- Newsletter frequency. Start with what is doable. Don’t start by sending emails every day.
- Time to send: no one cares if you send at midnight or noon.
- Length: focus on value, nothing else.
- Deliverability: these are things like not using words like “sales” or “free”.
Metrics
How do you know whether you are successful? You use SMART goals.
Smart goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant (focusing on what moves the needle)
- Time-bound
Smart goals are not about the output (what you get), but the input (what you produce).
It’s about writing a definite number of articles instead of getting a definite number of readers.
Here are some benchmarks to keep in mind as you are assessing your progress:
- Conversion rate to your email opt-in form should be 2%. You can’t hope for more than 4.77%.
- Open rate for your email newsletter should be minimum 20%, but aim for 35%. Get rid of the subscribers that stop opening.
- Don’t pay too much attention to click-through rate for your newsletter.
- Unsubscribe rate should not be higher than 1% (Netflix’s is 2.4%).
- On-site metrics: bounce rate should be less than 70%, and time spent should be higher than 1 minute.
Chapter 4: SEO
Every second, 70 000 queries are made on Google. Google is great because it gives you a wealth of information about what people are searching for online. You can use this info to inform your content creation process every step of the way.
From the CODES framework perspective, SEO is great.
- Cost: it’s free
- Ownership: while you don’t own the traffic, Google still directs traffic from their website to yours.
- Dependability: you pretty much know how many people you’ll have on your site every day.
- Effort: SEO is difficult because it is slow and must be for the long term.
- Scalability: nothing scales as well as SEO
If you want to do SEO well, you need to:
- Understand user search intent (how people think)
- Leverage the information Google shares for free (what people are searching)
- Optimizing your content (integrating what people want)
Many people try to optimize (with the right keywords, fast website, etc), but they don’t understand what they are optimizing.
You can optimize a website with crappy content all you want, it will still be crappy content. Since Google seeks to deliver to users the best content on the Internet, that’s what you need to do: write the best content.
Good content is:
- Credible
- Relevant to the query
- Usable for the searcher
Google judges these with different criteria:
- Keyword density
- Site speed
- Time on the website and bounce rate
- Links to your page and domain authority
Yet what Google favors above all is user experience. If you type a problem, find a page that seems to answer it, spend 1-2 minutes on the page then close your laptop or input a totally different query, Google knows you fixed your problem. As a result, the page will rank higher.
This is ultimately how you rank on Google.
Understanding Search Intent
When people search on Google, they have four different intents.
- Informational: the user wants to know or understand something. Often these are queries that have a who, what, when, where, why, how in the query. But not always. Eg: if you type “red wine stain carpet”, you’re likely to be asking how to clean a red wine stain!
- Navigational: the user wants to get to a specific site or product. Eg: Aure’s Notes.
- Transactional: the user wants to do something. Eg: “From word to pdf”.
- Commercial: the user wants to buy something, but often wants to compare beforehand. Queries that have “compare”, “best”, “reviews”, “vs” are commercial queries.
- Ambiguous: if you search for “apple”, you may be searching for:
- The company that makes iPhones
- Apples to buy
- Information about apples
As a result, Google will present you with a page and different results on it (the company, the wiki page about apples, etc).
Listening to Google
If you want to know the real intent behind a bunch of keywords, simply google the query and look among the first three results (they get 70% of clicks). Are the results, informational, navigational, or something else?
If you are not addressing the right type of intent in your article, it won’t work.
Keyword Optimization
Informational VS viral
Informational articles rank with SEO because they explain how to do something someone is going to search online. Eg: how to make an omelet.
Viral articles don’t rank with SEO. These are random articles you read when you see them, but you won’t actually look for them. These are articles such as “Thing You Need to Know About Life“.
Let’s have a look at how to target the right keywords.
Primary keyword
Your primary keyword should get the right intent, and be niche enough (not too broad).
You want something that people are searching (high volume) but which people have not written too much about as there will be competition otherwise (low difficulty).
As you grow your site and improve domain authority (how credible your website is), you will be able to target more difficult keywords.
Search intent
Make sure that you test your keywords in Google prior to using them. Some keywords won’t simply have the intent you thought they had. Some keywords will be too broad. If your article is informational, make sure the first results that pop in Google are also informational websites.
Search volume
You can’t select the keyword purely based on search volume.
- It doesn’t capture the intent
- You need domain authority (DA) to rank high
- It doesn’t say anything about keyword difficulty
Indeed, the first page of Google gets 99% of traffic.
1st place on a small keyword > 15th place on a big keyword. Make sure competition is not too high.
Optimizing your keyword
Your primary keyword should be:
- in the title of your article
- in the meta description
- in the slug of your article
- and multiple times throughout your article
The author recommends having the keyword as it is, which means no using alternative versions or synonymous.
Second Chances
As time goes by, your domain authority will increase, and Google will show more and more articles to people. This is why SEO is a long-term game.
Domain Authority
It’s a score Google gives you that indicates how relevant or important your website is. The higher your authority is, the higher the chances to rank high.
You gain authority with backlinks. Furthermore, DA is a logarithmic value. It means that going from 0 to 10 is much easier than going from 30 to 40.
Ideally, you should try to get 30 backlinks (from 30 different websites) as soon as possible.
Link Building Strategies
- Find some old websites of yours and put some links there in the footer.
- Pay for links: you can buy links for roughly $100/link today.
- Build your own link-building team: these are people using different strategies from backlinko.
- Buy a domain or website and put a link there.
- Guest post: it’s saturated, but it works
- Do interviews: it’s what most people do now. If no one is asking to interview you, reach out and ask to be interviewed.
- Interview others: great as the person you interview will likely share the interview on their social media, which will increase their following.
- Partnerships/exchange: link exchange with another company/creator.
- Give reviews: write a product review and ask if you can be featured on their homepage with a link to your website (many online tools quote what “Mary, marketing manager at X.com” said about their product).
- Claim unlinked mentions: search people that mentioned your website but didn’t add a link to your blog. You can also upload pics on Unsplash then ask people that used them to reference your blog.
- HARO: Help A Reporter Out is a service connecting journalists to sources.
- Become the reporter: use HARO to get answers for an article you want to write. Once your piece is written, notify all the people you talk about so that they can share the link.
- Create a linkable product: create a tool on your website that people will refer to.
- Solve a problem: every time you solve a problem, write an article about it so people can find it and share it.
- Submit to communities and directories: find a directory talking about the best blogs in your niche and ask to be added. Submit your articles to communities you hang out in.
- Submit on Producthunt, Hacker News, Reddit.
- Do competitor research:
- Find a competitor of yours, someone slightly ahead of you
- Look at where they are getting their backlinks from by plugging their site into Ahrefs
- Go check if you can get the same backlinks
Best practices
- Scan for dead links on your website.
- Update your content: your “best list of 2020” should be updated the next year.
- Speed up your site
Chapter 5: Monetization
Monetization will be like distribution. You’ll have to try a few different channels.
Consider how your audience views you: if they trust your opinion, do affiliate marketing. If they trust your knowledge, build a course, etc.
Monetizing Content
You do so by posting it on Medium. Expect to earn a few dollars per article though, no more.
Donations
Use tools that help readers make a donation.
Affiliate
Two types: self-serve, and hidden.
Self-serve are platforms or programs anyone can join. Amazon is the most famous one.
The key to making money with affiliates is to go for objects or programs and teach people how to use them. The teaching part has high SEO value + is a complete ad that encourages users to use your product.
Hidden programs are programs where applications aren’t open. You need to write to the company to get in.
Ads
They slow down your site, don’t pay much, and take massive real estate. Not recommended.
Newsletter Sponsorship
These can generate much more money, depending on the sponsor and the customer’s lifetime value.
Think about whether you will charge per email you send, per email that is open, or per click. These all depend on the sponsor and on the size of your list.
Finding Sponsors
Find companies relevant to your theme and audience. Don’t hesitate to contact them and explain how an ad in your newsletter could deliver value for them.
You can also subscribe to a newsletter like yours to see who sponsors them.
Products
This is the hardest. Creating your own product may also distract you from your site. But monetary-wise, it’s actually the best!
Digital Information Products
These are ebooks, courses, paid webinars or workshops, etc.
If you don’t know who to teach, ask yourself this:
- What do I know that 95% of people don’t?
- What do people often ask me about?
- What product could be a great extension of the free value I have given?
If you don’t know whether someone will buy your product, test it! You can pre-sell on Gumroad.
Community – Membership
Create a community you charge people to access.
Software
You can create apps, plugins, or create a board (like a job board) and rent it out to people that would want to advertise there.
Services
Some bloggers, known for a topic, created a professional service agency (for SEO, growth marketing, etc).
Even if you don’t monetize your writing, you’ll get opportunities thanks to it at some point.
Physical Products
From food to clothes to stickers, you can sell anything.
Chapter 6: Extras
Biggest Mistakes
If You Write, They Will Come
Great content is not enough, you need to distribute it.
Getting too Micro
Don’t obsess over what time of the day you should send emails, and that type of micro details.
Not Defaulting to Action
Just take action, don’t worry too much about planning.
Good Problems to Have
These are problems you’ll run into when you succeed.
Losing Your Time
When you grow, people will send you messages asking you for stuff. Make sure to put some limits.
Losing Your Edge
You lose your edge when you start getting mean comments and adapt to those comments. Don’t do that. Write for your true fans, and screw the rest.
For more summaries, head to auresnotes.com.
Did you like the summary? Buy the book here!
Bonus
The following isn’t in the book. It’s just random notes I have taken about building a blog. I am adding them here so I can free space on my phone.
Types of articles that work:
- Write about things you know
- Write about things you are excited about (tech, app, software, event, etc)
- Write about things you believe
- How-to posts
- Lists
- Researched content (with visual data, always better)
- Visual content
- Content hubs
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter and I'll send you a list of the articles I wrote during the previous month + insights from the books I am reading + a short bullet list of savvy facts that will expand your mind. I keep the whole thing under three minutes.
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