John Rush #May20: SEO in 9 steps & 300k ARR

Do you think SEO is dead?

I'm driving a hell of a lot of traffic from it.

My typical SEO routine (as a busy founder):

1. Launch my website & blog using Unicorn Platform

2. Check keywords using Ubersuggest on my top 5 competitors and edit my home page based on that.

3. Submit the sitemap to GSC and wait for 1 month

4. Activate listingbott.com to build up the domain rating.

5. Turn on seobotai.com to produce 1 article a day.

6. Turn on indexrusher.com to index those pages.

7. In about a month, check stats on Google Search Console, pick top-performing articles manually, improve them, and spend a full day on 5 top articles.

8. Check the top queries on GSC for the home page and edit the meta tags and h1/h2 to reflect those.

9. Spend 1 day a month doing steps 7 & 8.

10. That's it. It's not as good as if you pay an expert.

But it's very affordable. Total budget is below $1k, and it brings you from 0 to 1.

Once you are rich and successful, hire a pro to step up the game and go from 1 to 10.

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Today is a very special day for me.

Unicorn Platform is at $300k ARR!

original tweet

128,328 users built their Websites, Directories, Job Boards, Launchpads, and landing pages for their SaaS, Personal, App, Course, or Podcast.

How I got there (last 12 months):

1. Redesign.

I went through 1000+ support tickets one by one to 100 frequent requests.

At first, I wanted to start fixing them, but it'd taken us a year. I slept on this idea for a few weeks and realized that half of these may be solved by changing our entire UX from page-based to canvas-based. Like Notion, where there are no pages. It's only a canvas with a page, and everything else comes in popups.

It just erased 80% of the tasks from the backlog. 

Then we tackled the remaining 20%(not all ofc, still working on it). 

It reduced churn from double-digit to single-digit.

2. SEO.

I knew very little about SEO a year ago, so I had to learn a lot from scratch. Instead of implementing just one strategy, I went on to try pretty much all of them at once

- looked at existing keywords I rank for optimized pages for that to win even more traffic

- looked at competitors and created articles for the same keywords

- worked hard on domain rating, reached almost 80

- half of my pages weren't indexed, I used an indexing tool

- created lots of articles for nonrelated topics for the same audience

- I eventually built 3 more tools to automate all this work(Index Rusher for indexing, Listingbott for backlinks, and Seobot for articles).

3. Directories.

I saw traffic from directories 2 years ago on my other project(marsx). So it pushed really hard to list all directories for Unicorn Platform, too. Back then, most directories were not so popular yet, so I was kinda lucky to list them early, and as they went viral, I got a really good share of that traffic, too. 

Again, I automated this process by building a tool for it called Listingbott that now does it for me(it keeps listing my tools on all new directories as they appear).

4. Product Hunt.

We launched there in July. If you win the product hunt, there is a very long aftershock. You end up in newsletters and blog articles. We took 2nd place, but it was a very busy day. We scored over 1000 upvotes, so we got pretty good traffic and results.

5. Talking to users. Helping them.

I emailed every paid user, asking for feedback and starting a discussion. I talked to at least 300 of them. It helped me figure out some low-hanging fixes I could do to keep them, and I also had a very strong network effect afterward. Many new users would tell me they got a recommendation from their friend. 

Eventually, I started simply helping out all my users every day(I still spend at least an hour a day). For free. With my feedback on everything they ask, tips, and advice. I even connected one guy who was raising a round to an investor.

6. Social Media.

I shared all my steps—not just MRRs but my actual steps on how I got there and what I did. Many of such posts went viral and helped other makers grow their products. This led to X becoming the top 4 traffic source for sign-ups. 

7. Reddit.

I never even visited Reddit, but in November, I gave it a try. I got lucky at my first attempt, and it went viral. I mentioned Unicorn Platform in my text and had it as a link on my profile. It brought insane traffic. I went from 0.7 visitors a day to 7000. Basically, 1000% growth overnight. And Reddit is evergreen. So the traffic never really stopped coming.

8. Traffic from my directories & products.

I have 24 products in total.

So my other 23 products drive traffic to this one via links in the footer and banners, and sometimes I recommend it in an email. About 30% of the traffic comes this way.

Also, I have over 20 directories, some of which are very successful, and they drive good traffic, too. I had a gut feeling about directories 3 years ago. But my friends kept saying, "Directories are out of hype by now..".

So, I gave up on the idea until November, when I launched the AllGpts directory, which went viral with millions of visits. After that, I built a few new directories every month. You can call me a "directory lord."

9. Word of Mouth.

I track this via social media mentions, and it's my most important metric. It's the one in a pair with SEO that leads to PMF. In Jan last year, I was pretty sad to see that the viral "best landing page builders" posts on the internet would never have Unicorn Platform in them.

But all that I did above helped, and we started to appear in many such posts. Today, 90% of the mentions come organically from people on the internet. 

Thank you people. Thx for sharing. I work really hard to justify your trust.

10. Affiliate partners.

I've been running it for 8 months, and it works.

People bring sign-ups, and they eventually convert into paying users. Easy to set up. No effort at all once it's running.

11. Paid ads.

This one is short: I tried and failed. I most likely need to learn more about this, or maybe it never works.

12. Sponsoring other directories.

I sponsored a few directories to place my banner there. 

I like it. There is traffic. The ROI seems good. I want to do more of it. If you have a directory visited by busy founders, let me know, and I may sponsor you.

13. More templates and blocks.

I hired an amazing designer. He is the next Johnny Ive, trust me. We created many new templates and components. 

Now, we're working on a new update that will 10x Unicorn's power when it comes to visual stuff. Once this is out, you'll forget what webflow and framer are.

Imagine getting similar power with 10x less time than is needed and 20x easier UX.

14. Cross promo.

We partnered with Senja by adding their testimonial block to our third-party blocks. Now, Unicorn users can add Senja blocks with just a few clicks. It's so powerful that users love it and use it. We drove traffic to Senja, and they drove some traffic to us by posting on social media about this integration. We may do more, for example, sending an email to all our users about Senja, and Senja sends an email to all their users about a Unicorn.

I have many more such collaborations coming. The next one is RapidForms. Users can add very advanced forms with multiple steps and even payment steps.

Launching it next week.

If you think your product fits in, too, let me know. 

We both will grow our user base by doing these collaborations.

That's it.

I may have missed some details.

Just reply with a question, and I'll answer.

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