Learning Marketing - First Steps

I had been building products, like Email validator, Middle point, what’s next etc. As soon as I used to launch on product hunt, it attracted people for a couple of days but no one really came back again even though I was providing all these tools for free. Something was broken, and I wanted to know why.

Now that I think of it, one thing that I must be lacking was the audience. Certainly if I had an audience, I could have up-selled things. I could have even asked them what they wanted and maybe would have built that. I have realized now that product comes second. Audience comes first.

Enters Search Engine Optimisation. People look for what they want on search engines. If somehow we are able to present ourselves there, we can build an audience organically. If we have a stable traffic, we can upsell products to them. Or just display ads. This is not easy though.

Enters finding a niche. If we try to rank for hotels in London, we are doomed to fail. It needs to be a niche, and that people are looking for. Provide quality content there. Google somehow recognises that, and pushes you up in the rankings to the top. And all of this is a slow process. To find a niche, I used this useful tool called ahrefs.com. They have a free tool, keyword generator, which if you put any keyword that you think is a niche, it will give you more keywords that people are searching for that are related to the keyword. You can also leverage google search for that matter. I was mostly targeting keywords with difficulty less than 20 and volume in thousands. Then I was hoping I could build my niche website around that. I wanted a niche that did not require me to write content manually. The more it could be automated, the merrier it would be for me.

Enter my developer experience. Once I found my niche. I leveraged my development skills, used AI and generated around 14K pages. Generated sitemap and submitted it to google console.

After 2-3 days, both google analytics and search console started showing data. I have not shared the website anywhere except the search console. Whatever little data it is, it kind of validates that it is ranking somewhere and people are clicking on it. The number is extremely low, but I think it will take time. It’s a good signal though.

The next step is certainly to wait and see the trend before making more changes. The other changes that I think I might be doing will be using JSON-LD to help search engines understand the content better. Create social media accounts like on pinterest, youtube, twitter, instagram etc, hopefully programmatically and bring in people from there as well. But that is like increasing the discovery surface area, which I don’t know makes sense right now or not. Let’s see. I am currently reading This is Marketing by Seth Godin. In the next post, maybe I can share my takeaways from that book.