- emailing back and forth with people interested
- tweeting about SEO related things
- an email list of 150 people
- sharing my process of creating the course itself
Preorders (with a discount) totally killed it. More than 50% of my sales were preorders.
Launch day sales were a bit weak. I think the price was too high for Twitter.
However, I think there will be a nice long tail of sales. I'm still making a few sales every day. (~$500/day)
2/ Time
I set an ambitious deadline on purpose.
I know this SEO framework like the back of my hand, so the hard part was getting it all out of my head.
..and making sure it was solid, digestible, and actionable.
~70% of my time was spent WRITING. And rewriting. and rewriting.
Although it's early, I've gotten some nice feedback.
My goal with this course was to share my exact framework for how we 4x'd traffic in 6 months at starterstory.com.
It's no BS + about taking action, and I love when people tell me that's why they like it!
4/ Should you create a course?
100% yes.
Especially if you're a founder/expert and have some specialized knowledge.
Why?
- It doesn't take that long
- A nice cash infusion for your business
- You'll come out the other side stronger
- It's really fun!
I walked away from the course knowing MORE about SEO than ever before.
And finishing this course made me even more confident about the Lean SEO approach, and how we're going to use it to grow Starter Story to 1M/month and beyond.
Over the years, I've been VERY skeptical about selling info products (mostly my own ego), but now, my mind is changed.
I had a boatload of fun working on Lean SEO, and found myself really excited to work on it every day.
Last month, 250k people visited starterstory.com, mostly from Google search.
Here are some things I've learned about SEO:
1. Second-and-third-order consequences
SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.
Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.
Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.
Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.
A simple A/B testing setup for developers, a thread:
Lately, I’ve been experimenting and learning about AB testing!
In this post, I’ll walk through how simple it is to do AB testing with Google Analytics and a bit of custom code. I'll show you an example of a successful AB test and some things I learned.