How We Generate 1,000+ Signups a Week for Our SaaS Business

0:00[Music] [Music] Christopher the co-founder of snappa my other co-founder Marc's attending here as well where freemium Sasse with a low relatively low price point so in order to make this work bootstrap we need to generate a lot of signups so today I'm going to talk about how we've been able to do that through through three main things so two years ago we we weren't we didn't even think of snap at that time and we're working on a website called bootstrap a which was a marketplace for bootstrap templates and we grew that through SEO and content marketing so it's getting really into this stuff and I came across

0:50this blog post from Brian Dean of backlinko comm it's a great website if you're if you're doing content marketing and you had this case study about the skyscraper technique and basically what it is is you find link worthy content you make something even better and then you promote that effectively and so how do we find link worthy content so there's a couple tools that are that are really good for this so buzzsumo is a great one you can put any sort of keyword or a competitor URL and it'll give you all of the most shared content for that specific keyword or a competitor similarly on a trust or open

1:30site Explorer it'll give you all the backlinks so this is just incredible data to find you know what's working out there community sites are amazing read it's a goldmine they're subreddits for absolutely everything there's also more niche communities like inbound org hacker news so you can see what's popular and you can even search Twitter so in our case I was on Reddit and I came across this post on stock photo sites that don't suck and it got 290 upvotes and it did extremely well and when I went to this post it was basically just a list of links to all these sites so I thought to myself wow this could be

2:09improved upon so how do we improve things there's four main things and ideally you want your piece of content to you know take all these boxes so make it longer on average the longer your content the more shares and backlinks it's going to generate you want to make it more up-to-date freshness is always good better designed and more thorough so basically what I did was I took that original post and I checked all those boxes I made it more thorough I explained all the different licenses I said which license each resource fell under I added you know photos to all of them I made it more fresh I added more

2:53resources just try to beef up that post as much as I could and then once you have your piece of content it's time to promote it effectively so the first thing you want to do is email outreach every tool or person that you mentioned in your blog post always send them an email to let them know about it and most of the time they're going to be happy to share that the next thing you want to do is email all the people who shared or link to that piece of content so using those same tools like buzzsumo and 8 refs you can actually get all the people

3:24who shared that original piece of content so if you created something 10 times better they're probably going to be quite willing to share or link to your better piece of content so when all was said and done I wrote this post 17 amazing sites with breathtaking free stock photos and it generated 369,000 chairs most of that came from stumble upon it basically went viral and obviously there's a lot of luck involved I will acknowledge that but I was very methodical about how I went about producing this content and promoting this piece of content so since it's been released it's gone almost two million hits to that site and it ranks on the

4:09first page of Google now for free stock photos and continues to generate traffic so the key takeaway here is what is already popular that you can make even better this is going to be more difficult if you're in a competitive in each like marketing because you got guys like neil patel who write 40 thousand word guides but if you're in a more unsexy niche this could probably be a really good strategy so at this point we've got this piece of content that is you know getting more and more traffic month and I'm looking at all these sites that we're linking out to and none of them had searched at the time you

4:44couldn't sort them in anyway and so I thought you know it would be awesome if there was a stock photo site with you know these beautiful photos that you can actually search so I told mark I said can you code this and he said yeah sure and so we came out the side project stocks not a oh where we basically post these beautiful photos released under Creative Commons and it's not really well so we put it on product on it got over a thousand up votes when it got shared on Reddit it got four hundred up votes we emailed all these you know curation sites to get it added almost

5:25every blog post about you know where to find free stock photos we tend to get mention and we tried to email as many people as we could so this site is also done really well as you can see it's got you know three and a half million hits so far and it does about two in a two and a half million page views a month and so you know side projects I think are becoming a really good tactic especially if you're in a niche where content is getting really difficult so when WP engine first launched they came out with this WordPress speed test tool so it was a great little tool a good

6:00good lead generation source another good one recently is Co schedule so they they have software for content marketers and they built this neat little headline analyzer tool so it's a really good tool for content marketers to generate better headlines and then you have these like crazy side projects like followerwonk from Moz which is another great leader generation source so there's all kinds of examples of people who've developed these side projects that generate a lot of leads for their main business and so the takeaway here is what can you what can you give away in order to sell something similar and I guess a second takeaway would be taking advantage of

6:41opportunity we had that blog post I was generating a lot of traffic we could have just left it but we recognized like you know why don't we just make our own and capitalize even more so at this one we have two things that are generating a lot of content and we actually had built snappa at this point because we you know we had the idea for snappa and we knew that we had the traffic you know that would actually make it a feasible business so the first thing we did and the left-hand side is we added this banner ad so this generates about 50 signups a month for

7:15us which is okay but you know people are kind of getting you know banner blindness so the next thing we did was he added this link in the navigation to make it look a little more native and so this said well this gets us about 120 signups a week then we also added this you know made made by snappa on the home page was just 45 signups and then I thought well we still have that original blog posts about free stock photos you know let's let's do a call-out for snap on that so we highlight in yellow and said oh by the way if you're creating

7:51images if you're using stock photos to create images for blog posts and yada yada you're gonna want to check out snappa and so we actually get about 110 signups a week from this so that worked really well so at this point you know we have about 300 signups between all of this and you know what we were happy with that but for the amount of traffic the site was generating we knew we can do better and it kind of dawned on me that the person is going to be the most engaged right after they download a photo so I thought that would be a great time to

8:25maybe add some sort of pop-up or whatever so what I did was I created this animated gif so as soon as someone downloaded a photo it would play this and it would say you know have you heard of snappa to graphics design tool bla bla bla bla bla and as soon as we implemented this we started getting about 300 signups a week so this is a graph of our weekly signups and you can see that when we added that modal it was just pretty crazy for for the amount of signups that we were getting so the takeaway here is never stop optimizing you know Patrick I said everyone's

9:04you know always trying to get more traffic but sometimes you have enough traffic you just need to find a better way to convert or utilize that traffic so one more thing word of mouth has been huge for our business so obviously having a good product is important but one way that you can speed that word-of-mouth up is through influencers so the social media team at sem rush is using our tool to create images for their SEM Russ shot and you can see that at the end of their chats they always shout us out as you know the tool that they're using to create these images and

9:39when you have an influencer or recommending your product they're so much more willing to trust you and give you a chance as if they just kind of stumbled across your thing and so I was like wow that worked really well so just recently I emailed Suzanne Patel has really well-known in the marketing space and I said hey you know big fan of your work we just built this tool here's a login let me know what you think of it and so he replied back he said wow this is amazing you know the team loves it and so we actually got a testimonial for a mom now

10:12he mentions us in posts so every time we get an influencer you know giving us a shout out it really makes people trust us and more willingness to give us a chance so definitely identify the influencers in your niche and do whatever you can to get them on your side and using your product I forgot to post the slides so if you want them just email me at Christopher at snap at i/o or if you have any other questions I'd be happy to answer them thanks [Applause] [Music] you