How to get 100,000 visitors per month

I remember when my father first showed me Google sometime in the late ‘90s. He was excited about the simplicity - this free-to-use search box giving us the entire internet at our fingertips. Think about it. There is so much content on the internet. How can we possibly find what we’re looking for?

Fast forward to today, Google remains one of the primary ways people discover websites. There's a massive industry built around optimizing content just to rank on Google - search engine optimization, or SEO. I'd known about this vaguely, but it was eye-opening to realize just how much of the internet was built for Google rather than for humans. If you look carefully, you will find surprisingly many “blogs” on other websites. You’re not supposed to read those. The robots are.

I began to understand this in early 2023, when I decided to do some SEO myself. I had just started neural frames a few months ago, the early traffic spike of my HackerNews post started to wear off and I was wondering how I could get some traffic to my site.

From no traffic to a lot of traffic

I read tweets by fellow indie hacker Danny Postma, who had some great threads on “SEO for dummies.” and who has, since then, also published a course on this topic. I don’t have time for a course at the moment - maybe some day I will - so I will just condense my learnings so far into this newsletter.

SEO has a few components:

1. You want other sites linking to yours.

2. You want to mention the right keywords on your site.

3. You want people to spend time on your pages.

Google measures these signals and, if you’re lucky, rewards you with free traffic from around the world.

Early on in neural frames, I picked a few keywords that had high search volume and low difficulty (according to Ahrefs), plastered those keywords everywhere, let GPT write some blog posts, and hoped for the best. Sure enough, a few months later, traffic started rolling in for two of those keywords. It took me a few weeks to understand that this traffic were just people searching for some keywords - people that previously had no idea neural frames even existed!

If I hadn’t done this, neural frames would not exist today.

So much of our revenue comes from people searching for these terms - it’s awesome and scary at the same time. It’s risky to rely on one source of traffic, because Google could turn against you at any time. And this does happen quite a bit. But I also think you should enjoy and ride the wave for as long as it lasts - and so far there is no end in sight. Quite to the contrary!

I keep hearing that SEO is “dead.” There might be some truth to that. These days, you’re less likely to visit a bloated page with someone’s entire family history when all you really wanted was the recipe for mousse au chocolat. ChatGPT can just give this to you directly, or Google might show you the recipe snippet right away.

The SEO that is alive and well

However, there are other types of pages, and I don’t think they’ll lose relevance anytime soon. In general, to rank on Google, you can:

• Write blog posts

• Build landing pages

• Build free tools

Landing pages are great for people actively looking for solutions (e.g., searching for “video editor software” should lead you straight to Adobe Premiere). I don’t see this changing anytime soon. As long as people keep searching for solutions - and finding them - landing pages will stay relevant. They’ll probably only vanish once search engines can magically build these apps themselves. And then it depends on the complexity of your app if it will be threatened by this or not.

Free tools are also a great way to get traffic. For example, neural frames ranks for “Album cover generator,” and we let people create two covers for free before asking them to sign up. Ideally, if they need album covers, they might also need music videos someday.

Free tools also have the extra benefit of being genuinely fun to create. They’re small, self-contained projects that usually don’t come with all the heavy tech baggage of your main app. Every now and then, it’s refreshing to build something completely isolated - letting the builder side of my brain come alive and briefly pretend I’m a marketer.

Meanwhile, Google traffic to our blog posts might decrease, we’re kind of seeing this already. There’s less people trying to get pure information about something via Google. Or Google is directing less people away from their platform for that. But on the other hand, ChatGPT sends an increasing amount of traffic to us. How do we boost that? I think there’s significant potential for folks who figure out how to make ChatGPT mention their company more often. But in the end, ChatGPT is probably ingesting all this content made for Google under the hood - so maybe AIEO is just SEO in disguise.

Something I still find odd is how consistent Google traffic can be. I haven’t been at this very long, but how can it be that people keep searching for “album cover generator” day after day, year after year? How long will this last? Isn’t it a pool of people that at some point will be empty? What happens then to my nicely ranking free tools? 🙂 

Thanks a lot for reading my newsletter! Tell your friends ❤️ 

AI music video of the week

There is this dude in Death Valley who makes sick music and videos for these tracks. Fortunately for us, he’s been using, neural frames, next to other tools. He recently made a song with our new Kling 1.6 Pro integration. He even nailed the audioreactivity. What shall I say. This video blew me away and I keep coming back to the wild revelation that we live in an era where film material of this sort can be created by one single person for a reasonable amount of money.

❤️