From 300,000 users to 2.7 million in 18 months

hey to all that are looking for inspiration … here are the results after 1 year of mega hard work with a project I decided to partner with.

In the last 12 – 16 months, we increased traffic to the magic number of 2.5 Million users.
WARNING: We didn’t start from ZERO and I can’t reveal the site based on negative SEO or reverse engineering.

But happy to showcase stats.

Disclaimer:

Not all traffic are buyers
We have a lot of FREEseekers.

The Domain name

Backlinks

Last month Traffic

I want to give you ideas of what exactly we did
--> We published over 300 articles (we crushed it with content) Long type of content, very media rich, videos, tutorials, top 10, guides. We really pushed the social sharing of each content. So each article that was written went on FB, Medium, Quora… etc.. – we literally wrote each article with the goal of sharing it as much as possible

--> We launched a course for our users, so we could provide education and extra value for them.
This worked great because it created a reason to come back. The course was dripped so that helped a lot (we launched under TEACHABLE that makes it dead easy to manage)

--> launched a forum (this was a bit of a nightmare, it was great for traffic, but it became a pain in the *ss to control) The community worked but only when we had clear rules in place.

--> We hit Youtube HARD. Love Youtube and each video, became one piece of content and each piece of content ~~> later on became part of a series of articles… the more content we added the easier was to create more content.

--> We did contests (a lot!), every 2 months we did 1 contest with our audience.

--> We created a lot of video tutorials… our site is related to technology so we launched a series of tutorials to help slow users to use the site 

--> We did content syndication of our stuff in Medium, Linkedin, etc

--> We dominated QUORA.
We became super active in Quora, our goal was to become the #1 for the category. This worked great but a bit difficult to keep up. The Quora Ranking keeps updating all the time. A bit challenging.

--> We dominated Facebook Groups
This required a bit of work. We wanted to give value but always trying to send people back to the site. So is a weird mix, of providing value, engage, and send people to the place you want them to land.

--> We moved away from boosting our FB fan page and instead launching our own FB group

--> Our email list went from 20.000 to 150.000 members. This may sound great but we also faced issues with delivery and cost of sending emails. We had to move away from MailChimp and chose something more affordable

--> we split tested our landing page weekly….

--> we created a lot of case studies and we work hard to increase our social branding (Social proof, testimonials)

We didn’t pay for traffic once….
Overall budget spent in 14 months : 28K USD --> not bad if you ask me