Marketing & Growth

Salehin made $2K from a free product - after ThemeForest marketplace rejection

Saleheen built a ghost theme called Aesto. Then he applied for ThemeForest marketplace listing, but it wasn't approved. 

He posted on ThemeForest forum to know why it wasn't accepted 7 asked for feedback. To his surprise, lot of members don't even know what is ghost. Even after he stated that its a ghost theme they are treating the theme as WordPress theme.

Then he changed his mind & decided to make the theme public & open-source in Github. Also posted on Ghost Forum & IndieHackers. Then he setup google Analytics for the Theme Demo .

After some time, he was getting 200-300 visitors per day to the theme demo. To make money from it, he started offering Ghost services, built another theme InoLetter (and it's sold 100+ copies so far.)

Tip: If you have something getting traffic, try to monetize it by linking to your products & services.

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Drive organic traffic using question-based keywords

Producing question-based content is one of the easy ways to get traffic to your website.

Search your keyword (for example: Instagram) in Ahrefs. Now click on ”Questions” on the left-hand menu, we can see Ahrefs has found 347K keywords where Instagram appears in the question.

This is clearly too many keywords to analyse, so we need to apply some filters so that we can get a view of only the keywords that are relevant to us and worth our time trying to write content to rank for those keywords.

To do this we are going to apply to a maximum KD score of 10 and minimum Volume (monthly search volume) of 1,000. This has now brought the number of relevant keywords down to 41 – a much more manageable number.

Casting our eye down the list we can see that most of these keywords would be relevant to our customer’s niche. 

Before finalizing a question, assess the current status of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to really get a sense of how competitive the keyword is.

By clicking on SERP, Ahrefs will display the search results in descending order from 1 through to 100 along with the associated DR for each site. 

If a low DR site is ranking, we can rank for this question (search term) with a well written, seo-optimised article and one or two backlinks.

Snippets

• Here is a list of 2000+ fastest growing SaaS companies with growth %, number of employees etc.
• One arm army building a SaaS? Split engineering and marketing 50-50%. If you spend 1 week building features, take the next week in writing a blog post, or creating a series of Tweets, or value-adding posts that you can share in a related Facebook or Slack community. (Retweet)
• When you are running a deal with AppSumo, it places ads on searches for your brand name. So when someone is specifically looking for your product and might be willing to pay full price, AppSumo undercuts your own price with their life-time deal. And you only get to keep a fraction of that life-time deal revenue total (typically only 30%) (Tweet link)
• Are you making something for developers? Post your blog post on Dev.to but with a canonical link. (Do this after your blog post gets indexed in Google.) Read more about adding canonical URL here. 
• Careervault.io - a free database of 13k remote jobs from 1700+ companies worldwide. Expired jobs are deleted automatically, and 200+ new jobs are added each day.

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No marketing budget? Start writing. (Twitter)

- If you write 250 words/day
- Every year you’ll publish 50 posts
- If each post brings you 10 visits/day
- Every year you’ll have 200k traffic
- If your traffic converts 1%/day
- Every year you’ll get 2k customers

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Worth Reading

 1. Buy, don't build

2. Product channel fit > Product market fit

3. 18 ways to write a perfect meta description to boost your CTR

4. 3 email sequence examples that generate leads

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