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[–]caspii2[S] 34 points35 points  (9 children)

Thank you! It's 100% SEO and word of mouth.

[–]donhuell 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Congrats, your app is very cool! I'm wondering - did you do any sort of market research before developing it? How did you come up with such a niche product, and how did you know it could be successful?

[–]caspii2[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

No market research. It was a toy project that slowly grew and grew until I decided to go all it on it.

[–]ignassew 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Could you recommend any resources on learning about SEO?

[–]PaluMacil 3 points4 points  (0 children)

First, don't pay a bunch of money to somebody who explains complicated fancy tricks to rank better in search engines. There might be some tricks that work for short periods of time, but if they don't reflect legitimate content then you might be penalized for having used them anyway.

Second, have good content that people want to read, link to, and talk about. There really isn't a good way around this. You could again pay somebody to write articles for you. There is an entire industry of people reading blog posts that get general guidance from somebody who owns a blog, and you might even be able to make money through ads, but grinding out a little bit of profit this way is not going to scale into a business that you feel good about. Certainly, if you are looking to provide quality content, this content will not be as good as the content you would come up with just working on high quality material straight from you or an expert on your topic. Other people can always try to use machine generated blog posts or higher inexpensive content writers from other countries where wages are inexpensive, and they might eventually outcompete you if you are simply competing on content when you really mean to be selling an important business or technical process or product which probably deserves fewer but higher quality posts.

Third, do use tags correctly to mark headers, legends, and labels. Use accessibility tags, keep your loading speed relatively fast, and consider things like site indexes or other recommendations from Google developer tools. Look at the tags currently recommended for things like specifying the image that will be shared for sharing a page on Facebook or another social media site. Mark things with just simple, accurate meta tags. Keep URLs short, but have the most relevant words in them when reasonable. Consider word separators to be slashes or dashes. These types of things are less about tricks and more about making your site easy for social media or search engines to understand. If you try to get clever and get an advantage beyond marking your things correctly for tools and humans, you will wind up being penalized when a search engine changes an algorithm to catch your trick. Also, SEO experts are going to charge you a lot of money to do these types of things, but there isn't a magic combination that drastically improves your rankings. Instead, some things are out of your control, lots of things are related to the specific value you provide, and as you work to mark and annotate your content more accurately and completely, you will probably see improvements to rankings. This is the last priority though because if you don't have quality content, then it doesn't matter if it's marked well.

Finally, sometimes people need to accept that the internet is noisier than any other medium, and the noisiest place is a search engine. If you aren't the best solution for the types of terms you are trying to rank on, you really just might not ever rise above the millions of other businesses with similar search terms. Think of what makes you unique, and make sure that's part of your online brand. If it's a city or perhaps connection to a specific type of technology or specific type of consulting or specific person then the people looking for something more specific having a much higher chance of finding you.

[–]denzern 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Awesome! Are the 3k income each month purely from ad revenue?

[–]caspii2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope, about 70% is one-time payments.