Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

After one full year, I'm officially free of credit card debt! 💳

So last year I realized I was in a horrible financial situation 😞

I had to sat down and made a REAL budget 💪

One year 👉 Paid off total of $24,705!! 😱

How I did it 👇

2/ First off, I want to talk about embarrassment. Nobody talks about their financials, unless of course, they are great! So I NEVER hear about other ppl in credit card debt.

This has made me feel like I'm a failure or that I can't even manage basic financials...

3/ So I hope this helps others out there feeling the same way.

Maybe it's how I was raised (my parents aren't great either with it) but I consider myself pretty savvy.

4/ How I got in this situation?

Living in places like SF and NY and never saving, living basically paycheck to paycheck. Then I did a coding boot camp and funded most of it off credit cards. Then I moved to NY.

Spending on my CC and thinking I'll figure it out later.

5/ Going on expensive trips with friends and funding it off my CC. Having friends that don't have to focus too much on budgeting (parents help them) and keeping up with their lifestyle.

ANDDD IT'S DONE.

Clout Report: Crowdsourced data on hundreds of upcoming rappers.

We compiled a list of over one hundred upcoming rappers and used APIs and scrapers to get over 2,600 total data

Don't let the image fool you! Hear me out!

Features:

Sort, filter, and search by:

- Gender, age, location, record label, region
- SoundCloud follower data
- IG, twitter, and FB follower data
- YouTube subscriber data
- Spotify data

I think this is particularly useful/monetizable for:

💿 record labels looking for new talent
🥁 concert/entertainment venues that want to gauge the size of the audience of an artists
🎧 artists looking to collaborate with other artists
😎 finding artists "before it was cool"

We built this in 24 hours on stream!

Thanks so much to everyone who slaved away at googling for all of these usernames, ids, etc: @AlecOfJones @jnil @DigitalSparky @cameronrohani and sorry for everyone i cant name

Many ups and downs.

Per usual, there's always someone trolling the stream. We had dozens of people editing the google sheet when someone kept deleting data and columns...

Luckily Gsheets has revisions..

How I auto-share ~120 blog posts to Reddit every month, reached 35k karma, and gotten millions of views.

And why I love building automation so much!

A thread!

I have hit the top of Reddit hundreds of times.

Through all of the love and hate that I get on the platform, I think I've found that it's here to stay.

After years of posting on Reddit, I've slowly built an automated system that is now 100% hands off.

This is my Starter Story backend, where I save the content of my stories in a markdown format.

This is great for Reddit because Reddit is also in a markdown format!

While I edit and publish starter stories, I set the "reddit title" in advance.

This is so I don't really ever have to think about it again. Once that's set, the system knows it should post this one to reddit, and that should be the title.

I also create a "Reddit intro" and "outro"

Although the content of the blog post is stored in my database, I still should introduce myself in the Reddit post.

I use other variables in my database to construct this.

If you have less revenue/growth/success than you wish you had, then the best thing you can do is OWN IT.

Write a tweet, tell your friends, and move on.

Once you own it, you fix it.

99% of people on Twitter/social media/internet won't do this.

Being radically transparent and honest is a competitive (and life) advantage.

From @RayDalio's Principles:

My new product has 14 users and <$400 monthly revenue. I've spent the last 4 months on it.

I'm going through a lot of pain to validate and grow it.

But if anyone asks me how it's going I will tell them exactly that.

If I asked them, I would hope they would give me the raw truth as well. Truth builds trust.

I think that goes for your internet audience as well. Authenticity is attractive.

I see this with @starter_story all the time - people don't want to share their revenue yet because they don't have any, or it's not high enough (not all cases but often).

I wish I could tell them that getting the cat out of the bag would actually fix the problem itself!!

SEO helped me generate over $350k in the last three years (over $200k in 2020 alone).

Indiehackers that focus on SEO tend to have more success than those who don't.

I'll break down what makes it so valuable.

THREAD

1. Demonstrated Demand 🗣

If people are searching for a solution to the problem they have, there's demand for a product that solves that problem.

There's no guessing. You can see the search volume for different markets to determine its size.

People want what you're selling.

2. Search Intent 🔍

SEO is so different from social media, simply because the people typing in keywords are warmer leads.

If you're on FB and see a promotion, it's mildly annoying. If you're on Google, you're looking for that thing anyways.

They're ready to buy something.

3. Ownership 👑

You hear it all the time - people say to write on your own blog, host your own email list, etc.

SEO allows you to do just that. It drives traffic to the most valuable assets you have. You don't need other platforms.

You can do whatever you want on your website.

4. Traffic Value 💰

I pay ~$2.5k/month for 3k clicks using Google search ads.

I also get an average of 250 clicks/day through SEO, working out to be 10500 clicks/month.

That's ~$8750 in free traffic every month.

In the initial days of our startup, I had no clue about SEO.

5 years later, SEO is a crucial part of our marketing strategy.

I've built a robust 33-step SEO checklist based on my learnings.

Today, I am sharing it with you 🧵

33-step checklist over 6 categories:
1) Setting up (1-6)
2) Keyword research (7-14)
3) Content creation (15-18)
4) Publishing (19-23)
5) Technical details (24-29)
6) Link building (30-33)

Meanwhile, if you'd like to check out my

Part 1: Setting Up

1/ Set up Google Search Console

Google's free tool to help you monitor your SEO performance. Has the most accurate data.

Can help you:
- Monitor keywords you rank for
- Find website errors
- Submit sitemap

Frequency: One-time

2/ Set up Google Analytics

Google's free tool to help you monitor website traffic.

Pro-tip: Connect Google Analytics with Search Console to get access to deeper insights.

Frequency: One-time

3/ Create and submit a sitemap

Sitemap helps Google find pages on your website easily & effectively.

You can submit a sitemap manually through Google Search Console or setup an automated script to update & submit your sitemap regularly (recommended).

Frequency: One-time

I've been doing SEO for over 15 years and optimized 100's of websites.

Here are the best techniques you can use to rank higher in Google 👇

Answering the searchers' intent is key

Anyone who's doing a Google search wants 1 of 4 things.

1. Information
2. Navigation
3. Transaction
4. Comparison

Let's dive in all 4

1. Informational intent

These are queries like "turkey recipe", local weather and how-to's.

People are looking for help on how to get things done. They'll do it themselves. You just need to give them the right tools.

2. Navigational intent

People using these keywords are looking for something specific. A brand like "Hypefury" for example.

It's not hard to rank for competitors but you won't get a lot of traffic out of it. Focus on the comparison intent (which we'll talk about in a sec)

3. Transactional intent

This is used when people want to buy. The search results are littered with ads and it's pay-to-play.

It's really hard to rank high on these types of keywords AND get any meaningful organic traffic. This is where Google makes its money.

@curaffairs The author doesn't know enough about search to have written that article and the reason he's having those problems is AI algos like Rank Brain and Google's attempts to use natural language processing nothing to do with SEOs.

1/x

YMYL is not evaluated at the site level, but the query level.

Again this is on Google, not SEOs because they want to surface better sites.

And those devaluations are part of Core Updates which SEOs like me recover sites from.

2/

Featured Snippets are not optimized for - you can use certain HTML to be pulled in one but there is no definite use case where Featured Snippets are shown or that your site's will show for it. Also doesn't always come from the #1 result.

& that's Google not the SEO.

3/

Also there are many times when an SEO doesn't want their site in the Featured Snippet cuz it doesn't result in a click to the website. But we have no control over what Google pulls as Feature Snippets except to put in a meta tag to exclude us from them

4/

And Neil Patel is not an SEO. Most senior level SEOs see him as nothing more than a scammer because reportedly he's ripped them off by stealing their content and articles and passing them off as his.

5/

Tip: Everybody wants backlinks, but few provide real value first in their cold outreach. Get high-quality backlinks by giving candidates a list of broken links on their sites and providing highly-relevant alternatives.

Thread 👇

If you're trying to boost your SEO with backlinks, "broken link building" is a better bet than your run-of-the-mill cold email. Here's how you do it.

First, find links to 404 pages from sites in your niche. You can do this by exploring blogs with a free tool called Check My Links.

But the easiest way to do it at scale is with services like Ahrefs or Moz. And you can also use these services to find out what other sites are linking to the broken page (the more the merrier).

Once you find something within your expertise, check out what the original article included by using archive .org. Then write something of your own that encompasses and improves upon it.