Tripled our traffic in less than a month
by Emelie KlassonTLDR:
- SEO
- Quora
- Product Hunt launch
- Free Resource
- Outreach
We must admit, in the beginning of april we were pretty low. After spending months pulling our hair out over our outsourced dev teams delays we almost gave up on our platform, which had then been pretty much down since Christmas, and it felt like nothing we did gave any results.
We then stumbled across a product which we found really cool and reached out to the founder in the hope of discussing a potential API partnership - but it turned out so much better than that. The founder had absolutely no interest in integrating us with his platform (fair enough) but was set on sharing all his valuable insights on how to bootstrap a digital product without spending any money. We were in shock. During the 3 years we've been running our own business, no one has ever just sat down and laid it out so clearly. With his guidance and the fire lit under our ass, he gave us the target to double our traffic within 30 days. Little did we know, that we would actually triple it!
Here's a few things we did:
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We created a free resource library to attract leads at the top of the funnel.
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We reached out to several blogs/websites listing stock media sites to get our name on there. Being listed on these sites brought us direct, relevant traffic.
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Product Hunt launch. We made a fairly successful launch on PH which brought us approximately 10% of our unique visitors over the course of a month (we also did a fairly UNsuccessful one, but let's not talk about that).
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Quora, we became active at answering relevant questions (to our business) with high quality answers and insights.
Our focus moving forward is to bring our free users further into our funnel, get more backlinks on relevant sites, move our blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory and add key word rich landing pages (e.g. /free-drone-footage) to increase SEO.
(Thank you @sabba at veed.io for taking the time to help us out)
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YES! Great work guys and super pleased I was able to help!
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Congrats for tripling your traffic as well as a new boost of motivation!
Out of the things you listed that you have done, which one would you say had the biggest impact?
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Thanks Michal, and really cool to hear that you're a drone pilot yourself. Are you licensed? Once you're confident enough feel free to reach out to us on the platform, we're always looking to expand our community of contributing pilots :)
Back to your question. I'd say it was really a mix, but one thing which helped hugely was getting listed on some of the websites listing stock media. Even if a lot of that traffic was to our free resource, at least we got a bunch of creators at the top of the funnel. If we can convert 1% of those it would be a win, really.
We also had a really bad idea of SEO before all this, so just being seen in places I think will help us in the long run. We're also, which I forgot to mention in the post, trying do expand our blog/resource with a lot of relevant content for content creators and video makers just to raise awareness of the platform, provide value to the community and help us rank better in Google.
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Offering free resources which then helps with getting listed by other websites is a great strategy. Worked for me too in the past.
Regarding SEO, I recently completed this really good free online course from Ahrefs and have been implementing it on my own project since. You might find it helpful too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGCSC1C2OQ&list=PLvJ_dXFSpd2tbI3mYhAO8oZ2NYMrJuNPq&index=2
Good luck!
ps: I am not licensed and I don’t even have my own drone yet, just occasionally borrow drones from friends and fly and shoot videos for fun. If it ever becomes more than that I’ll get in touch :)
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I just checked your website and the footage there is really good. I enjoy shooting drone videos myself but mine are nowhere near as as good haha
Upvoted on Product Hunt 😊
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Wow, congratulations! That's inspiring.
By the way, I noticed your site was loading slowly for me on my home wifi in California. E.g., the words "Dynamic stock drone footage" (great title) showed up on a white background for several seconds, which was confusing because the letters are white with a shadow. When the banner video did finally appear, it kept buffering and freezing.
You might have better conversion by speeding up the page.
I think it may be due in part to some very large js and png files on the page. Three of the files took 13-17 seconds each.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to give us this feedback Brian, it's really valuable. We're aware that the speed of the platform is under all critique, we've recently done a big update and everything-speed just went down hill from that 😬
Next on our to-do list is to update the hero video and images to reduce loading time, and once we've got the cash we'll invest in some more advanced fixes. Do you have any other tips perhaps on quick fixes which might help? :)
Thanks again!
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Yes, one quick fix you could do without putting in a lot of money or effort: I see you’re using nginx. Configure it to compress all responses with gzip. You’d be surprised how much this can help. (I don’t remember how to enable this but it should be a small change.)
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Hi again Brian,
Thanks again for the tip. Im just wondering, is gzip one of nginx's free tools?-
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Hi Emelie,
Yes, gzip is built-in to nginx. To edit your nginx configuration you need to ssh to your server and run:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.confYour "http" section should start with this. Please note that the "gzip_types" section is one long line
http { gzip on; gzip_min_length 500; gzip_proxied any; gzip_comp_level 4; gzip_types text/css text/javascript text/xml text/plain text/x-component application/javascript application/json application/xml application/rss+xml font/truetype font/opentype application/vnd.ms-fontobject image/svg+xml; gzip_vary on; gzip_disable "msie6"; ... here come your server blocks / rest of your config }When finished, run this to verify that there are no errors in the config file. If you’ve made the changes correctly, you’ll see no error messages:
sudo nginx -tThen restart nginx:
sudo service nginx restart -
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Amazing, thank you SO much!
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Well done Emelie! 🥳
Getting eyeballs on your work takes a lot of effort, so great job!-
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Thanks Zviko 🤗
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Congrats! I have a question about this:
We reached out to several blogs/websites listing stock media sites to get our name on there. Being listed on these sites brought us direct, relevant traffic.
Is there a template you follow to reach out to other bloggers/sites? And how’s the response rate like?
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Thanks Lim :) Good question!
I personally really dislike receiving any kind of message which feels like it's made with a template, so I always avoid that myself. First of all we always try to reach out to people on the platform where they're most active (this takes a bit of research). Next is to write them a personalised message, and then we generally follow this up by trying to connect with or follow them on LinkedIn.
If we're reaching out to a company we research who's working at the company and who we should connect with personally to avoid being pinged around different contacts at the company. Regarding the response rate it's pretty hard to tell since we don't send out masses of emails that we need to track. I really do think that with a personalised approach the response rate is a lot higher.
Please let me know if you have any more questions :)
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Thanks for the insight!
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