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We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

patrickambron.me

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Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#31

Post by patrickambron »

spindritf wrote: post #25

How much better are your results in boosting visibility as compared to for example getting myname.com and linking to myname.com from all social media profiles?

Getting yourname.com is always a Great move (we let you apply a custom domain to your BrandYourself profile), and you want to link all your social media profiles.

We basically walk you through a simple process

1) Make sure you have relevant content on the web (FB, LI, personal website, etc)

2) Make sure that's as search engine friendly as possible (are you using you're actual name, is there enough relevant content on it, can search engines index it correctly, etc)

3) Make sure all of your relevant content links to eachother (Your FB should link to your personal website, etc)

On average users find after going through our "boost process" for any given link, it rises a full 1-2 pages(10-20 results) in their google results.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#32

Post by patrickambron »

whit537 wrote: post #22
patrickambron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea absolutely. We track everything through our own internal system and through analytics. We want to know where our best users come from. Which sources get people to sign up, which sources bring the most active people, and which sources lead to the most subscriptions. It helps you focus your marketing/PR efforts.

I'm interested to see how HN does for you. The front page in my experience drives an order of magnitude less traffic than you saw from Mashable, which is still a nice bump. Let us know how we convert, eh? :-)

Yea, I think I'll post on this thread at the end of the day w some numbers, or maybe even do a quick follow up post tomw. Either way, I'll let everyone know

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#33

Post by patrickambron »

ga4 wrote: post #29
patrickambron wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear: You were asked to share your link after every step in the boosting process?? It should just be your final boost step, which you can choose to do or not. Looking into this now

I just tried to recreate and could not.

Yea, it should be your final step (it's 1% step that helps, but you don't need to do it). I can't recreate the bug either, but i have my eye on it. That would be annoying so thanks for the heads up

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#34

Post by patrickambron »

aresant wrote: post #26

I love this service, was in the early signup group and within a month controlled my first 10 results. Keep expecting a pivot to small biz though and hope that's in the plans, seems like a much easier group to monetize.

Thanks for the kind words and for using the product.

Right now we are focused purely on individuals (it helps us keep the product simple). It stems from our mission, "a person shouldn't have to pay a lot of money to manage or improve their own search results." While small businesses are easier to monetize, we're happy to just help as many people out as possible, and as long as 2% want the premium features, we're in a good place

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#35

Post by joshuahedlund »

Very cool, looks like it has a lot of potential. I'm hoping you have some spam prevention strategies in place, though, as it seems pretty ripe for it as it takes off (just like any free service that lets you create profiles and post links to sites, but especially a service that promotes SEO and posts followed links to sites)

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#37

Post by rhp »

nyellin wrote: post #28
patrickambron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@pdx yea you nailed it. Most of our users end building a BrandYourself Profile, which is a simple (but pretty) profile that's really well structured around your name, so it generally ranks on your first page. From there we can use the IP addresses of visitors to determine who they are We could always tell you when someone found that profile and where they came from (they came from FB, or they came from Google after G…

Haven't tried this, but can't just do a whois query for the IP address?

That's not always reliable. For example, if you do a query on my company's web server IP address, you'll just get the name of our ISP as your result.

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#38

Post by patrickambron »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #35

Very cool, looks like it has a lot of potential. I'm hoping you have some spam prevention strategies in place, though, as it seems pretty ripe for it as it takes off (just like any free service that lets you create profiles and post links to sites, but especially a service that promotes SEO and posts followed links to sites)

Yea that's a good point. The nice part is, we don't create any profiles or links on behalf of the user. They need authenticate things like twitter, fb, etc on their own, so they actually need to have or create these profiles. They need to go through the work of creating all the relevant content, and linking it to eachother, we simply let you know if they are optimized/filled out enough, and track their ranking

Interestingly enough, one of the things we need to keep our eye on is people going through the trouble to create accounts--including social media profiles---about other people. Would not have guessed that would be a problem

Re: We (unexpectedly) got 60K users in 60 hours - What we learned

#40

Post by quanfucius »

I really like how you guys built a viral mechanism into the product. You incentivize the user to share their BrandYourself with their existing profiles/networks to receive a "boost", which helps spread word of your product. Pretty ingenious if you ask me. Good job guys!
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