SEO + SaaS = Trust the process?

[heavy_industry]

Awesome thread, thanks for sharing.

On the other hands you see complete $!$"F {not so smart people} showering in money, which makes me angry.

Don't be angry or envious of them. There are two reasons for that:

• Understand that the market does not reward people for being smart. It rewards people for providing perceived value. If you have something that people want, they will throw money at you.
• As a psychological defense mechanism, you will never become something you hate. Don't hate rich people if you want to become one of them.

My left brain side tells me that it's worthless to work on it and my right brain side says if the growth continues the site will be huge in a few months.

Feeling like it's hopeless it's a natural part of growing any successful business. The numbers on your site are very optimistic however, and they indicate impending exponential growth.
(it's already exponential, but I'm referring to the steep growth curve you're looking for)

So I guess my question is how to handle the emotional side of being an entrepreneur?

1. Set a goal.
2. Make a plan. Define a process that will take you to that goal.
3. Forget about the goal. Focus exclusively on the process and do it as best as you can.
4. Win.

I would also suggest not looking every day at the numbers. And do not react emotionally to them. There will be a lot of variability in the short term. It's the month to month average growth which is of interest.

 

[seomatic]

It has been a while since my last update. The site is still growing and growing. Not only on Google but also on Bing. I've made it to 200 users/day during weekdays. The goal is to make it to 1,000/day and then start building the product.

Milestones achieved:

• more than 10,000 impressions/day
• more than 200 visits/day (all channels in GA)
• Average position improved to 12.9 coming closer and closer to the top 10

 

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[seomatic]

reached 1,000 clicks/week for the first time. Yesterday was also a record of daily visits: 235
working currently on some more commercial content and applied to google ads to see if there is monetary value.

 

[Paul David]

If you've got enough money to live for the next 10 years whats the risk?

 

[seomatic]

I worked as a warehouse employee when I started, so I maximized my earnings per hour by doing double shifts and Sundays. Then I could write most of the week, and I'll just push through and show up every day.

Nowadays, I'm working as a digital marketing specialist (I got the job by showing my website), but I'm going to leave soon as I need to dedicate all my effort to this, and the job requires a lot of brain power.

I invest at least 2/hours per day, usually more. Somedays, I don't write at all, but the average is +2h for sure.

PS. All the benefits I have gotten from these efforts in +1 year aren't money. I have gained great skills in SEO, writing, researching, analyzing, and more. Compare that to a school etc, and I think my efforts have paid very well so far, only not in money.

I know what you mean. When I started, I was doing parcel deliveries just to keep my brainpower for my side hustle. If you work an office job, your brain is exhausted at the end of the day.

The skills are nice, but I don't won't to work for someone else anymore. Corporate jobs are always misery. You make someone else rich in the best case and in the worst case you get involved into some BS office politics.
Never again! I will rather move to the forrest, before taking another job.

That's why my plan is to get enough traffic and then build my own product.

 

[seomatic]

Yes a more physical job is better when working on a side hustle. Paracel delivery was probably great for that.

The skills can be used for much more than working for someone else, which is what I meant! I'm done with working for someone else too. It doesen't have any thrill to it either!

A solid plan man I'm sure you'll succeed!

Thanks man, you really gave me motivation to continue my journey. Great to see your success, it's an inspiration.

I've noticed how important it is to celebrate small milestones. Today my site reached a new all time high in impressions.
22.5% higher than the last high and the day isn't over yet.
Next goal is 2700 impressions/day, because that's 1 million a year

I've seen that impressions are an early indicator of success: First impressions go up, then after a while clicks follow.

PS: I think I will post updates here, because it might help to stay consistent.

 

[AmppaDamppa]

Thanks man, you really gave me motivation to continue my journey. Great to see your success, it's an inspiration.

I've noticed how important it is to celebrate small milestones. Today my site reached a new all time high in impressions.
22.5% higher than the last high and the day isn't over yet.
Next goal is 2700 impressions/day, because that's 1 million a year

I've seen that impressions are an early indicator of success: First impressions go up, then after a while clicks follow.

PS: I think I will post updates here, because it might help to stay consistent.

View attachment 43627

Great to hear! I've gotten inspiration and guidance dozens of times from others and it really helps!

It really is, celebrate all milestones and yes, impressions bring clicks!!

Yes post here or somewhere else but be sure to post them. I'm always looking forward to them haha. I'll be waiting mate!

 

[seomatic]

I thought a bit about life and so on and I decided to go all-in on the project. It's already such a big advantage that I can focus 100% of my efforts on it and don't have to work a normal job. I have to stop wasting time and trolling the internet all day and instead get to work.

So I decided to give it all I have for 100 days and if it doesn't work out, then I know for sure and my head is free to try something else. I can live with failure, but not with regret. Thanks again to @AmppaDamppa for the motivation.

 

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[Bing]

I'm far from the biggest fish here, but I am a (half) owner of a SaaS business which took 8 years to scale to $100k/month, but here I am. Let me share with you my growth graph and illustrate how SaaS truly is exponential, but with a long runway up front. (Note: the huge dip is COVID, which basically cost me a year to recover from, entrepreneurially speaking).



The point I just want to make sure is clear is: (1) every dip can be viewed as an indicator to exit -- do you have the faith to hold (and, if possible, correct) when you drop? and (2) do not zoom in too much on any given point or you might miss the larger picture; what follows is an illustration of this with AAPL stock (my first stock purchase).

 

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[Zyzzz]

linkable asset makes sense.
I hate outreach. Is there any good service for that? Or better hire an outreach person?

Most link-building services are sh*t, they just send you some links that'll probably get you penalized in an algorithm update. Understand it before hiring someone to do it, you can find them on Upwork.

 

[seomatic]

Yesterday, the site reached a new all-time high in impressions and clicks. The growth slowed a bit down, but the average position sits now around 15. I couldn't work on the site this week, because I'm working on something that might make money earlier than the site so I have to prioritize it. However, once I'm done I will push again and goal is to improve content quality even further to make sure we reach average position of better than 10.

The time while not working on the page wasn't lost, because I learned quite some interesting things about the google algorithm. For example, some keywords just dropped out of the top100 because they were not relevant. So overall keyword count went down, but traffic went up. I assume it's because for some keywords google isn't quite sure so it does a lot of testing and either position goes up or it goes down and drops out of top100. But it isn't a bad thing because for some keywords you don't want to rank (when they are irrelevant to the content it will just bring down your metrics).

 

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[seomatic]

Maybe you are not patient enough or you are focusing on monetization rather than getting more organic traffic. I thought the goal was to build a SaaS and get as much traffic as possible via SEO, what changed?

You're right. I need to refocus on traffic generation.

The site reached new All-time highs this week.
+ 2,610 clicks since last update
+ 174,000 impressions since last update
+ 1,9 average positions improvement

 

[seomatic]

I just looked up the google analytics data and actually the site grew 57% in August. So not too bad.
Aiming at 10k monthly users now. Do you think I could speed up progress by posting more or does it just take time?

 

[seomatic]

Hey fastlaners,

I started a new website recently and while I'm seeing some results, it's just a slow grind. Essentially I'm working on improving the site, doing seo and all of that, but I'm not making enough money to live off of it. On the other hand there is huge potential in my opinion.

So I'm unsure at the moment if I should continue growing the site or not. I guess my main issue is a lack of trust in the process. I mean my trust in society is very low and I've been scammed a few times by clients not paying and so on. So I'm thinking twice about putting any effort into something. On the other hands you see complete $!$"F {not so smart people} showering in money, which makes me angry.

My left brain side tells me that it's worthless to work on it and my right brain side says if the growth continues the site will be huge in a few months. I have currently enough money saved to live for 10 years or so without working, but it's still an uncomfortable situation to put all effort, time and energy into one thing and live off savings. It feels like losing ground for some reason.

So I guess my question is how to handle the emotional side of being an entrepreneur?

 

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[seomatic]

What is your site about?

The confidence for me always about the size of the sector and industry. If people who have influence in the field are making money in it, then you will make money.

Then you just need to focus on growth.

If you have no confidence on monetization even when you have an audience later then it is probably a bad route to be taken.

I am a small youtube creator btw, working on it part time.

It's a service for professionals. That's why we have the up and downs during the week. People search for it more on weekdays and less on weekends.

There is a company doing like 300 million annually in sales in the industry. my project is focused on a niche within that industry. When I divide the revenue by the users on their website, they earn like 3 EUR per visitor. (all of their sales coming from website)

Once I get to 100 clicks per day, I will start doing soft monetization experiments: collecting leads, farming retargeting lists and so on.

 

[seomatic]

I am a small youtube creator btw, working on it part time.

I also tried youtube and reached like 1 million views or so, but the downside is that you have to create new content all the time. With SEO it's more like a create it once and profit for years of it. Of course, you still need to put in work to stay ahead of the competition, but the lifetime of content is much longer in general. Also I don't like to be in front of the camera, however some people have definitely talent for it.

 

[seomatic]

Awesome thread, thanks for sharing.



Don't be angry or envious of them. There are two reasons for that:

• Understand that the market does not reward people for being smart. It rewards people for providing perceived value. If you have something that people want, they will throw money at you.
• As a psychological defense mechanism, you will never become something you hate. Don't hate rich people if you want to become one of them.

Feeling like it's hopeless it's a natural part of growing any successful business. The numbers on your site are very optimistic however, and they indicate impending exponential growth.
(it's already exponential, but I'm referring to the steep growth curve you're looking for)

1. Set a goal.
2. Make a plan. Define a process that will take you to that goal.
3. Forget about the goal. Focus exclusively on the process and do it as best as you can.
4. Win.

I would also suggest not looking every day at the numbers. And do not react emotionally to them. There will be a lot of variability in the short term. It's the month to month average growth which is of interest.

I'm not an angry at all rich people, I know a few and most of them are good people. I'm just angry at people who are rich and dumber than me or people who made their money illegally or immorally. We have this saying: "The dumbest farmers have the biggest potatoes".

Yes, the numbers looking better and better, that what keeps me going. It's just the reality of exponential growth, that it starts so slow.

 

[eliquid]

I'm not celebrating. Actually I'm disappointed that the site isn't growing faster. But I'm also not worried about algo updates too much. In my opinion updates are done to prevent seo tactics mostly. I haven't used any tactic that could get punished by google. Now I understand that's what probably every seo thinks. But yeah I haven't even build a singe link so far, only published content. And my content isn't even that good, I'm still working on improving it.

Why do you think the site would grow faster, it's only a few months old.. right?

If you think Google only punishes link building tactics, you haven't done SEO very long. There are specific updates that pertain to content and quality of content. AND there will only be more of those coming.

There were plenty of perfectly fine white hat and gold standard sites that got hit on this last update ( and updates prior ). An algo update can and does wipe out sites that never did anything wrong on their end.

Just be mindful of that.

Also the competition isn't such a big problem in my market. It's a new developing market and the competitors aren't doing such a great job. Actually that's one of the reasons why I started the site in the first place. For example they have the product and content and two separate domains and aren't really advertising the product effectively.

So what's your plan when your competitors do produce better quality content? What about when a higher authority domain publishes similar content ( but isn't a competitor and outranks you )?

Competition is always an issue.

If you aren't going to build links, you are going to have a hard time when other updates roll out.

You have to be thinking about 2-3 years down the road.

 

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[AmppaDamppa]

This has become an interesting thread! Nice job @seomatic keep it up.

 

[seomatic]

Yesterday the site reached a new all-time high in impressions. Just a little bit higher every day

 

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[seomatic]

Nice job it just keeps climbing! How old is the site?

PS. The estimate isn't that off with SEMrush even when it always is a bit because that purple line is impressions, not traffic. Anyways, when impressions grow, so does traffic.

It's now 130 days since the first impression. I don't think time is a very important factor though. The old saying that SEO takes 12-24 months is probably some BS invented by SEO agencies to keep their clients longer while doing nothing ... when I see "seo case studies" were the graph is going sideways than I'm thinking who is paying for that.

Also it doesn't make any sense: Let's say you have the best content for a topic ... why would google wait 2 years to rank it? Completely illogical and it seems most things google does are actually based on logic. Opposed to how most other companies operate. I guess that's why Alphabet is one of biggest companies in the world. As a proud shareholder I can't wait for the stock split.

The real bottleneck is how much excellent content you can produce and that is very time consuming. It takes 10-20x longer to write an excellent piece of content than an average piece of content. And that doesn't include the additions:

• breadcrumbs
• FAQs
• images, infographics, alt tags ...
• videos
• tools
• translations
• canonicals

I'm not even on a good level I would say ... there is still 10x potential to improve. Have to go from ok to good, then to great and then to excellent. I manage to produce 1 piece of content per day and that's already really exhausting.

It's like a rabbit hole. Once I completed one piece of content there are 10 more ideas in my head. It is limitless.

 

[seomatic]

The site hit 100k impressions in the last 28 days

Day 19/100

• Fixed all mobile usability issues (mostly content wider than screen caused by wide tables ... split them up into multiple tables and it improved appearance also on desktop a lot)
• added a ton of FAQs - total is now over 500 and goal is to reach 1k
• posted one new article today

 

[seomatic]

The average position was < 20 for the first time! I believe it was due to some new content I was producing.
It is much more detailed now and ranks much better.

 

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[seomatic]

Hit 6k impressions and new all-time high in clicks last week.

 

[heavy_industry]

Well it's obvious to see that western societies fall apart piece by piece. Energy prices have literally gone up 10x in the last 2 years. Gas prices are higher during summer than last winter. Just terminated my place because it is obvious that utilities will be higher than rent next winter. And still politicians have the nerve to tell you how great green energy is.

80% of dollars have been printed in the last 22 months. That means everyone who worked before that for money got robbed of 80% of the buying power. How is that not criminal and f upped? Do we know that doesn't happened again?

Oh, I see.
Yes, unfortunately the economy goes up and down. Humans have a bad habit of messing things up.

Let's prepare to the best of our abilities for what's to come, and let's be thankful that we won't starve to death due to food shortages. Other people in some regions of the world won't be that lucky, so let's try to work hard and make the best of what we have.

 

[heavy_industry]

I just want to live in a proper functioning society. Where can I find it?

We will have to build it ourselves.

I understand you, your points are very valid. It's best however to focus on what we can do to help ourselves and to help others. It's the best strategy we have. Just because it's the best strategy it doesn't mean that it will work. But there is no better alternative.

Keep pushing hard with the website, looking forward to seeing your amazing progress

Take care my friend!

 

[seomatic]

The site hit 7k impressions yesterday. It is still growing, but I can't work on it currently. I have another project I need to take care of first. But I'm definitely not giving up on the site! It's interesting to see how SEO is really "passive" in a way.

Also the average position is getting better and better. I've noticed that google is ranking some keyboards better and some are just dropping out of the top 100. Which is fine, too, I guess.

I still have a lot of anger in me, but working helps. It's a bit like meditation. I love to focus on a hard problem till I figured it out.

 

[Zyzzz]

What's the best way of doing this?

Creating a linkable asset and then promoting it through outreach.

Not yet. It started essentially as an experiment to see if you can rank and get traffic without any links. However, I feel now it's time to build some links too. What's the best way to build my first links? I thought about having some linkable content like infographics and then running some paid ads for it. Does it work like that?

Just checked my site in semrush (it's possible to check 10 sites for free per day) and it looks already super-exponential. Real traffic is almost 3k per day so the 856 estimate is a bit off though.

View attachment 44126

Running paid ads? Doesn't work like that. You might consider reaching out to other sites in your niche telling them your infographic is a perfect fit for their 'X' article...blah blah blah...

 

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[seomatic]

The site reached an All-time high in clicks and also the average position is the best it ever was: 13.8
I'm getting ready to continue work on the site next week.

 

[Zyzzz]

The site reached an All-time high in clicks and also the average position is the best it ever was: 13.8
I'm getting ready to continue work on the site next week.

View attachment 44328

Noice! Consider embedding related youtube videos in your articles.

 

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