Road to 1 Million

Overall Traffic

March was a bad month. I had high hopes with a new tool coming out and the related Product Hunt launch. But things didn’t play out as expected as we’ll discuss in a bit.

Organic search traffic accounted for 53% of the visits, a little 5% increase in terms of total volume. A bigger jump in terms of traffic percentage, this is due to a steep decrease in the direct and referral traffic.

Signups

In march I’ve gained 325 new signups to the Newsletter, reaching a total number of 2,040 subscribers. It’s not bad but given the Product Hunt launch of TweetShots, I was expecting the number to be above 500 at least.

I’ve had a lot of positive feedback on the tool and I’ve already released a meaningful update to the product, but likely for small tools like this, the signup to experience creates a lot of friction.

SEO

March was an ok month from an SEO perspective. Domain Rank is stuck at 61 but as the number gets bigger it’s gonna take more and more effort to increase it, so overall it’s expected.

There was a small drop in Referring Domains and a larger one in Backlinks but that’s not a concern. Link building is going very well and I acquired a meaningful number of DR60+ link.

The ones I’m loosing are mainly low quality ones coming from redirects of old domains I had acquired.

My post on best marketing books, is stable in the top 5. Really happy about it, it’s a competitive keyword and one which I could monetize with Amazon should I want to in the future.

I’m also consistently ranking #1 for “b2b saas marketing” and climbed to #11 for the higher volume “SaaS marketing” keyword.

Tools

Tools keep rowing in the right direction but slower than expected.

ZeroBlur keeps bringing in from 10 to 40 new daily installs and in April will cross the 3,000 active install milestone. I’ll work on a major update in April which will let users signup to my app to share their blur area across multiple devices. Not sure how appealing this feature will be, but it’s a first test to start generating leads from it.

SaaS Examples traffic is down to 4,805 pageviews but a drop was expected after the initial product launch. I keep updating it daily and soon will start adding some more text content to take a shot at ranking category pages. Ranking for the main page is now up to #18.

Not good enough to generate organic traffic, but a big jump compared to February. Overall my capacity to rank this tools is gonna determine if they are able to be evergreen lead generation tools or one shot traffic boosters.

TweetShots‘s launch was disappointing. Even though it ended up being the #3 product of the day on Product Hunt, it generated only 900 visits to the website that day and signups have been slow. However it’s a first step in moving all my tools under a single login and a real SaaS app. Right now it’s not ranking for any of the keywords I’m shooting for but only 7 days have passed since its launch so that’s ok.

Newsletter & Youtube

Still nothing on the Youtube side but I finally sent out the first newsletter to announce the launch of TweetShots, I’ll now start sending it every two weeks and only increase the frequency to weekly once I’m confident I can keep it consistent.

I had a 28% open rate and almost 5% click through rate. Can be improved for sure but not bad overall given I’m not a Pro at email marketing.

Sorry if the statistics are not really easy to read… I can’t wrap my head around how bad ActiveCampaign UI is.

TechStack

More or less my TechStack didn’t have any major shakeups but I started using some new tools.

I’m dogfooding Breadcrumbs to track usage and implement PLG for my products.

I’ve fell in love with Loom to record short videos to asynchronously coordinate my team. I love it and actually I might use it for Youtube content production too.

I’m using my fellow YC batch-mates Awesomic to work on illustrations and product UI. So far they’ve delivered a great output + they’re Ukrainian and I’m happy to support them in this challenging time.

Overall Traffic

February was an ok month with 11,886 visits. Basically flat compared to January. However in January I had a big Product Hunt launch which generated a meaningful spike of 3,000 visits in a single day.

Organic search traffic accounted for 40% of the visits and it’s not exactly where I’d want it to be even tho’ the core metrics are all moving up. In march I’ll try to focus more on content production rather than link building.

Direct traffic had a big jump to 33% of the total. In my opinion this is mainly due to the free marketing tools I’ve released.

Referrals spiked to 17% of the traffic. I expect this to go down over time and is mainly driven by ProductHunt and the positive press and mentions I got from the new tools launch.

Signups

In February I gained 498 subscribers to my Newsletter, ending the month at 1,715 subscribers. It’s a respectable number but was mainly driven by signups to SaaS Examples. Nothing wrong with it, launching tools as a way to attract traffic and signups is part of my strategy; but I’d love to see more organic signups from the blog.

March is still gonna have a strong focus on tools but in April I plan to double down on lead generation from the blog.

SEO

February thanks to the launch of the second tool has been great from a link building standpoint. My DR jumped from 59 to 61 and a lot of new backlinks were acquired:

However overall SEO traffic was down 5%. This is unexpected and mainly caused by a drop in the SERP of one of my highest traffic post in Instagram Bios.

I’m still debated if I should go after fewer high volume topics or more lower competition ones.

For sure while I’m doing a good job on backlinks, I should absolutely double down on writing content. I’ve published only one piece of content in February and I’m not expecting it to perform well since it’s mainly personal considerations on blog acquisition with not much SEO optimization.

On the bright side, the last day of the month my post on the best marketing books, jumped from position 100 to 7. It’s a fairly high volume keyword, I’ll need to build way more backlinks to make it in the top 5 and really not sure if I’ll ever make it in the top 3.

Tools

Tools have proven to be a very effective marketing strategy for me.

ZeroBlur keeps getting strong traction without any effort on my side. It has now crossed 2,000+ active install on the chrome store and smaller numbers on other browsers. Every day it gets 15 new installs on average. I’ve also finally connected the Chrome Store page to a dedicate Google Analytics account so I’ll get better reporting. A mention on Ken Moo’s Facebook groups has brought in good traffic to the website and 100+ more install in a single day.
The downside is that ZeroBlur does not have any login, so I really have no way to reach these users. Good learning for the future.

Overall Feedback has been very good:

SaaS Examples is going very well with 12,474 pageviews across all its pages and a lot of backlinks from high-DR domains. I’m keeping it up to date with at least 5/6 new companies added every week. I’ve built a good process here and most of the work is managed by external contractors. Let’s see if I can make it in page 1 for the “SaaS Examples” keyword which has a high volume (3,200 searches/mo). Right now I’m in position 32.

Newsletter & Youtube

Nothing, zero, nada. I didn’t send out a single email or recorded a video for my Youtube Channel.

In March I’ll start sending out the newsletter, I absolutely have enough subscribers now and it could have an impact.

Youtube is something I’d love to explore but setting up the lights, recording, editing, etc just takes too much time for me to really focus on it right now. However I might do an experiment in March with a software review.

TechStack

Nothing really relevant happened to my tech stack used to run the blog. I’m using more ActiveCampaign as I’m getting ready to launch my newsletter and I’m getting really distressed by Convertbox’s lack of updates. Seriously starting to consider making the switch to Convertflow.