It's been a week since I launched Lean SEO, my first info product, here's a look at the numbers:

Sales: $28,226
Hours spent creating: 85.5
Hours spent promoting: 18.5
Total hours: 104

What I learned:
1/ Sales

My sales strategy? None.

No ads, and no elaborate landing pages.

Just:

- 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.
Course creation:

Most of my time was spent on course creation:

- outline (~30 hours)
- slides (~30 hours)
- screencasts (~10 hours)
- misc (~10 hours)
The rest of my time spent on promotion:

- emails (~12 hours)
- tweets (~5 hours)
- misc (~2 hours)

Here's a detailed breakdown of all time spent:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d… Image
3/ Feedback

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! ImageImageImageImage
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.
Next steps?

-> Build out a course marketplace at starterstory.com

We've interviewed thousands of founders, why can't they also sell courses about the companies they've built?
Logistically, creating a course is quite easy.

The most important thing you need: valuable, specialized knowledge!

If you have some interest in doing something similar, please let me know.

We can help a bit with the audience and promotion.

Email me: patrickswalls@gmail.com
You can see the entire process from start to finish here:

And here is the course if you're at all interested in the Lean SEO framework:

starterstory.com/lean-seo

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More from @thepatwalls

14 Dec
I don’t understand why people go crazy for fancy expensive SEO tools.

I just use Google search autocomplete to find content ideas and keywords, and this has worked really well for me.

Here's how I do it:

I just type a big keyword and then the letter “a”...
Then, I’ll try with a few other letters of the alphabet.

Typing “b”, and “c”, and “d”, etc:
Another thing I’ll do is stick my cursor in the middle of a query:
Read 6 tweets
9 Nov
I wrote 365 blog posts in 365 days. What I learned:
1. Writing solves problems.

When things got hard, I pulled up a blank Google doc. When depressed or frustrated, I used writing to

(1) get it out of my system, and
(2) reason through solutions

Not only did writing solve personal issues, but business ones too...
In the last year, I’ve doubled revenue and tripled web traffic. This is not luck! It’s from writing (example).

Would I have figured these things out on my own? Yes, but slower. By writing, I was able to think and move faster. Probably 2-3x faster.
Read 13 tweets
17 Sep
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.
Read 12 tweets
30 Jun
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.

Inspired by @levelsio
I don’t use Google Optimize, Mixpanel, etc as I found them to be way too clunky and hard to figure out.
Read 14 tweets
22 Aug 19
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!
Read 15 tweets
1 Mar 19
Feb 2019 #openstartup report:

Revenue: $3,740
Visitors: 42K
Mailing List: 4K

A reflection on (1) the business & (2) nomad life.

👇
(1) THE BUSINESS

Search traffic continues to rise.

There are now many days where the site gets 1k+ visitors from Google Search.
I tested a slide-out email subscribe CTA - I thought I would NEVER do this.

My email opt-in rate has always been pretty low. The results were phenomenal.

I implemented Feb 19, you can see the massive spike below.

Shoutout @Klaviyo for allowing me to do this so easily.
Read 31 tweets

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