Burning the Boats: Going All-In on a Side Project

The other day, I tweeted out a question asking whether or not I should write a post about this, and a few people said go for it:

So here it is. But before jumping in, a little bit of background.

In 2012, I was living in San Francisco and started teaching an SEO course to startups on the weekends, outside of my normal job. I ended up turning it into an online course, and it eventually started generating more revenue than my salary. In 2015, I wrote a blog post about the whole experience here: A Six-Figure Side Project.

That post, basically the early story of ClickMinded, became the basis for a few conference talks and podcast interviews (I know, right?).

THIS post, the one you’re reading now, is the second installment. It’s an update on what’s happened to this dumpster fire of a business, from 2016 to now.

I’ve now spent the last two years working full-time on this thing.

Here’s the story.

The Numbers

I was torn about whether or not to share the numbers. “Real” entrepreneurs with serious businesses might look at the numbers and then discount the rest of the story because the business is just too small.

Friends, family, old co-workers and the like might take it in the other direction and think that this is impressive, but that I’m being fake-humble and just openly bragging.

Both sides are probably right.

The problem, is that it’s just a little bit too easy to BS through a post like this giving generic, feel-good, emotional advice on how to take your side-project full time, without any context on the size of the business. So here are the numbers, in their raw, heartless and impersonal form:

*2019 is an estimate based on what we are on track for. Our goal is actually higher than this.

The operating margin has ranged from 60-75%. This year is on track to be the highest margin year ever.

Because of a massive investment in automation over the last year, we’ve significantly reduced the number of hours it takes to run the company. If you contrast the revenue numbers against “hours worked”, this thing starts to look interesting to the lifestyle business / laptop-on-the-beach crowd:

From an “hours worked” point of view, the business is starting to look like the dream. An homage to Tim Ferriss and the 4-hour work week. A legendary lifestyle. Basically, all that you could ask for, right?

But here’s another perspective. I’ve been working on the business for 8 years. 8 FREAKING YEARS.

Here’s a list of companies that were created AFTER ClickMinded:

Okay, sure, we’re playing a different game here, to say the least. Comparing a lifestyle business to all these VC-backed unicorns makes no sense.

But what if we take it a step in the other direction. What if we compare ClickMinded to, say, getting a job as the Regional Manager at the Panda Express in Rosemead, California?

Currently going at a cushy $65,115 a year.

For the first couple of years, it was not looking good. The offer from team Panda Express was looking pretty formidable relative to ClickMinded LLC.

Are we starting to take off now? Sure. At least it looks like we are. Which is great, and now ClickMinded has the reviews to back it up as well – but that wasn’t a guarantee.

You know what would have been a guarantee?

A cool $65,000 a year managing the Panda Express in Rosemead, California.

Along with probably all the General Tso’s you can handle.

Obviously simplifying this ridiculous analogy from taxes, expenses, raises and many other things, it wasn’t until the 4th year in the game that I started surpassing what I would have made managing a freaking Panda Express.

When you look at the numbers, and what the reality of a “safe career” actually means, I think it’s pretty reasonable to question whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze.

I think it’s very easy to argue that ClickMinded has been either a wild success OR an abject failure, depending on your perspective.

We’re definitely not a rocket ship – we’re more like a golf cart with a lawnmower engine and a couple of deflated tires.

With that said, the perception of lifestyle businesses seems to be changing. Having no investors, no debt, and most importantly, no obligations to anyone else has its advantages.

Okay, with all that out of the way, here’s how the last two years went.

Leaving San Francisco

When it was finally time to leave, I was fired up.

I had spent 6 years in San Francisco. It was a great place where I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people – but I was so damn ready to leave. I liked my friends and I liked my work, but I was very much over the city.

I don’t want to turn this into a “why I left San Francisco” post – feel free to head over to Medium for that. But at the end of the day, after 6 years, I was ready to GTFO.

When it was time to go, my friends and co-workers were the greatest ever. My annoying one-liners and inside jokes that no one else will understand were turned into t-shirts. There was a goodbye video, a party bus, and lots of whiskey.

Good people that I don’t deserve.

The plan? Go full-time on ClickMinded. Pivot from an SEO course to a complete digital marketing training program, and go head-to-head with Universities, digital marketing boot camps, and online courses.

I called up a friend of mine that had helped me film the last version of ClickMinded and told him the plan. He loved the idea. I asked him if he was up for filming it, and he said: “Sure, but you have to come to me, and I’m in Hamburg”.

To Germany, we go.

First Realization

I’m an over-hyped shithead

One of the first things I did before creating the new product, which I think is critical for anyone planning to go full-time on a side project, is sat down and tried to figure out how far behind the game I was.

Managing search engine optimization at PayPal and Airbnb for 6 years was a lot of fun. I learned a ton, and it was incredible for my career. But I think it’s fair to say that at least some of my SEO knowledge regressed while working at big companies.

The things you end up working on day-in and day-out can often turn into stuff that’s specifically tied to the company – it doesn’t necessarily have value out in the real world.

Putting together presentations for product managers about the total addressable search engine query market size for a new product doesn’t necessarily mean anything to the outside world. So while I had spent 6 years thinking I was the man, the reality is a lot of the things I had learned weren’t transferrable.

This made me realize that almost every conference speaker, who comes in representing a big company and presented as a “thought-leader”, is usually an over-hyped shithead.

The vast majority of these people are not actually doing work that matters to their industry. In general, avoid them.

I was able to realize that I, too, was probably an over-hyped shithead. Turns out I was right.

To solve this, I re-evaluated the entire digital marketing universe. I looked at what I knew and what I didn’t. I laid out a massive outline of how each channel worked.

Then, I spent two weeks pounding coffee and Adderall and took more than 40 online courses at 1.5x speed, along with devouring countless blog posts, case studies, and new tools.

It was probably the least-healthy / most-rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

It was refreshing (albeit scary) to jump back into the game, and to realize how much I had missed while sitting behind the walled garden of a big company.

Cracked out on study drugs, I made a blueprint of how I was going to expand the business from a single SEO course to a suite of digital marketing courses. Originally codenamed: “ClickMinded Platinum”.

I developed a curriculum for 9 courses, created hundreds of slides, rented a warehouse and started to prepare for filming.

We had a marathon video recording session and filmed 15+ hours of content in 3 days.

Total Cost: $15,000

I loaded up an external hard drive with 15-hours of footage and headed to the place I had been planning on moving to for more than two years: Bali.

Bali, Indonesia

A few years into starting my business, I had stumbled across a podcast called the Tropical MBA, and a private entrepreneur group associated with it called the DC. They are my people. The forum is basically a graduated version of the Four-Hour Work Week, filled with entrepreneurs creating remote Internet businesses while traveling.

They have a weekly podcast interviewing people that are traveling around while working on their businesses. I was, and still am, obsessed with it. Many of the people interviewed were living or had lived in Bali. It sounded like the dream. Work on your business, laptop on the beach, coconuts on the hour – what’s not to love?

Heading to Bali had been on my radar for YEARS. And I was finally about to arrive.

I was so excited. I made it! I got rid of my apartment in San Francisco and everything I owned. I had consolidated my life down to one backpack. I created the beginnings of a new product, and here I was ready to bring it to market. This was everything I had planned for.

I had so much hope – but my expectations were SO HIGH, and when I finally showed up, it was a nightmare.

During my first week in Bali:

Turns out, if you spend too much time planning something, and it doesn’t go absolutely perfect, your expectations can get WILDLY out of control, and you are almost guaranteed to be unhappy.

The next day, I looked in the mirror and tried to get it together.

I came up with a plan to try and turn things around:

Things started to slightly improve together. I was no longer throwing up on myself and getting robbed. Serious progress.

Because I was so overwhelmed, my plan was to launch just the SEO course to start and hold off on everything else.

The problem was that I was moving way too slow. I still didn’t have a clear enough direction for where I was going to take the business, and I wasn’t confident it was going to work.

A year earlier, I had worked with an apprentice that was one of the smartest people I had ever met. He was very familiar with the business already. I threw a hail mary, and sent him an email:

Eduardo was previously a student in a course I taught at a University. He was working at Teachable in New York.

The offer was simple: to help me re-launch the ClickMinded SEO course to users via a webinar.

To this day, I still don’t know why he said yes. Maybe he felt bad for me. Maybe he really did see the potential of what could be. Or maybe it was more like being unable to look away from a train-wreck.

Either way, it doesn’t matter now. He was in.

We started to plan, edit the course, and get ready for our first-ever webinar launch (if you’re doing your own webinar, make sure to use our webinar checklist to get going).

The Launch

Everything that could have possibly gone wrong, went wrong:

But even with ALL of those disasters, having left the country 2 months earlier, learning all the new content, filming all the new stuff, messing up as much as possible and fumbling the webinar as hard as we possibly could have, even with ALL that…

We pulled it off.

$50,244.50 in 7 days, June 2017.

I wasn’t going to die (yet).

Going All-In

After a successful launch of the SEO course, and new-found confidence that I wasn’t going to die for at least a few more months, I went to New York to meet with Eduardo, to figure out if we could actually turn this dumpster fire into a legitimate business.

We talked about the future and what this could be. We ate Venezuelan arepas at a hipster restaurant in Brooklyn and had one too many beers. He started going on a long rant about how the entire digital marketing industry is a bunch of cheap, BS entertainment disguised as information. He wanted to focus on creating really comprehensive digital marketing tutorials, checklists and walkthroughs for users, while simultaneously giving everyone in else in the online marketing media industry the double middle finger.

This conversation would be the basis for a new product we would eventually launch, called the SOP Library.

Eduardo was in. He said that he would work on ClickMinded with me part-time until we got to the point where we were big enough that he had to go full-time on it.

I had filmed 6 additional courses that were not yet launched, but they simply weren’t good enough. I didn’t have the credibility or expertise to teach each of them on my own. So we decided to take all the money from the SEO course launch, and re-invest it back into the business. The plan was to find the best possible instructors across each category and make it super easy for them to teach a course for us.

Total Cost: $60,000

We ended up finding incredible instructors to join us. The 6 additional courses were:

The idea was to lock down these world-class instructors to teach a course, get them started on all the content, and pre-sell our current users on the product before it was ready.

Having a god-awful webinar under our belt was actually very helpful. We had a much better idea of what we were going to do next.

We did the pre-sale over 3 weeks. It took a massive amount of preparation. We wrote 18 emails and pre-sold the new courses over 2 webinars…

… and made $113,593.23 in 7 days. September, 2017.

Eduardo put in his two-week notice. We were all-in.

Read the email that started it all and brought in $113,593.23 in 7 days.

The Co-Founder

One thing that makes our journey unique is my co-founder Eduardo, and his vision.

I’ve been told again and again that it’s the founder’s job to have a strong vision for where the company should go and what it should be. What happened with us, was that Eduardo’s vision for the direction we should take ClickMinded was actually much stronger than mine.

We both have very different and complementary skills, but his idea for where we could be valuable to our users, and how we could position ourselves, resonated with me a lot more than my own.

This is, allegedly, a faux-pas, a taboo, in the world of entrepreneurship. The founder is supposed to be the one with the rock-solid plan that everyone rallies behind.

But what are you supposed to do when someone you hire is way smarter, better represents your customer avatar, and has a clearer, stronger idea of where you should go?

If you ask me, you do what I did.

You GTFO of the way.

When I offered him the co-founder role last year, he was ecstatic. In his own words:

“Being the co-founder of a 2 person startup is BS and means nothing. But okay, I’ll change my LinkedIn I guess.”

So. Pumped.

The Trough of Sorrow

Like any good adventure, we hit yet another trough of sorrow.

After successfully pre-selling the courses for $100,000+, we had a ton of work to do.

30+ hours of video content needed to be filmed and edited, and a new product (our SOP library) had to be created from scratch.

We launched the V1 of the product and rebranded the business to “ClickMinded Digital Marketing” in December 2017.

In order to promote it even further, we created a week-long event with 8 free webinars over 4 days and called it the ClickMinded Digital Marketing Summit, modeled after how Teachable does virtual summits.

It was a massive amount of time, energy and effort from us, to say the least. I flew to meet Eduardo, who had moved to Malaga, Spain, and lived there for 3 weeks. The plan was to physically be in the same city and focus on this launch.

Long story short: it was a disaster.

So there we were. After the euphoric highs of pre-selling the product, Eduardo quitting his job, hiring a team, launching, and preparing for a massive webinar promotional summit, we now had a product with a high refund rate, a summit we spent a month preparing for that didn’t work, and a site that started losing traffic because of changes we made once we rebranded.

It was February 2018. It was cold, we were grumpy, and the business was suddenly unsustainable and losing money.

Investing Long Term (aka: Taking Vitamins While Bleeding)

One of the scariest parts of the story was when Eduardo insisted we invest in automation while the business was losing money. He wanted to create a brand new way to manage the site and run the business long term, while we were struggling with short-term stuff.

He was convinced that we could use Drip, an email service provider and CRM, to deliver our courses and content in a way that was extremely automated and optimized for our users.

The problem was that this was a long-term, risky bet. And we were bleeding, heavily, in the short-term. It felt like the wrong move.

I wanted to focus on fixing and testing more basic things, like changing copy and pricing, but Eduardo was convinced that this was the right thing to do, and that the best time to invest in it was now.

Again, when you find people that are smarter than you and have a stronger vision than you, my advice is to GTFO of their way.

We ended up making these investments. Eduardo put a significant amount of time into setting up Drip and creating a new way to manage all of our users, content, courses, and webinars, an internal tool he nicknamed The Ring – aka “The One Ring To Rule Them All”.

It took a bunch of time to set up, and once it was ready, we knew it would be even longer before we would start seeing results.

We crossed our fingers.

The Problem With Cockroaches

The upside to getting our butts kicked for a solid 6 months, was that it turned us into cockroaches. And the problem with cockroaches is that they just won’t die.

Once Eduardo had created The Ring, we had a very straightforward way to run experiments with automations. With the new ability to test changing pricing, offering cross-sells, up-sells, flash sales, and webinars, we tried a bunch of different things.

I wish I could say there was this single magical moment where we turned the business around, but nothing like that happened.

We ended up fixing the business in the most boring and un-sexy way possible.

We listed out all the problems we had, along with what we thought were the biggest opportunities, prioritized them and tackled them one-by-one. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t, the “wins” started to compound, and we started to recover.

The biggest wins were:

All of these changes were only possible because of our risky but critical investment in automation early on.

We had successfully pivoted again. We went from an offline SEO course (fun fact: ClickMinded’s very first user was Kamal Ravikant, in my first class in 2012), to an online SEO course, to an online digital marketing course, to basically an unstoppable automated digital marketing tutorial and webinar machine.

It wasn’t particularly fast. But we did it. By June 2018, the business was finally starting to pick up.

The Pain of Digital Nomading

The traveling really started to get to me. Changing cities and countries became addictive, but it started to affect the business.

You get this massive rush of dopamine when you move to a new location, but moving every few weeks and months comes with an incredible hidden switching cost.

Finding a place to live, a place to work, your gym, grocery store, restaurants, people to hang out with, the best way to get from A to B, what to avoid, etc – was extremely taxing. I found that, in general, it takes about 2 weeks to actually get settled into any one location.

Eventually, I wanted to stop. I moved to New York City in August, 2018. Once I took the traveling out of the equation and started to focus more, you could see the change in our business almost immediately.

Traveling for a year and a half with nothing but a backpack, working on my business, was fun. I’m not going to say I won’t do it again. But when I decided to stay in one place, I found that it became way easier to do a smaller number of things really well.

ClickMinded Today

It took us a while, but I think we finally made it to the next level. The business is almost entirely automated, and when we work on it, it’s mostly to improve those automations. This is a really advantageous place to be in.

There will inevitably be setbacks – we are ready for a few more devastating troughs of sorrow. But at this point, 2 years out, I can safely say that the business is working, and we are excited for what’s next.

We have changed a lot, offering a bunch of new products and tools. Our marketing strategy generator is one of our best new AI tools. You can use it to automatically create a marketing strategy for your business, like for a mobile game, a CPA firm or an HVAC company.

Today looks a whole lot different than when we started. We now have:

None of it could have been possible without the amazing work of Andre, Mio, Dorin, and Octavia. Thank you so much to our incredible team!

Final Thoughts

Still with me? Let’s wrap this up.

I learned a lot going full-time on my business over the last two years. Here are the highlights:

Exit Velocity

I’m fully convinced that the best way to go about building a business like this, is to have someone pay you for it first. Work for someone else, learn as much as possible, and start working on your business while you’re there, using what you’re learning on the job every day.

Turns out that we accidentally did this before there was even a name for it. My friend Dan Andrews came up with a great way to describe it and used the term exit velocity.

“Exit Velocity” = The amount of professional and entrepreneurial momentum you have when quitting your job and starting a new venture. Momentum can come from a variety of sources: investment, capital, experience, anchor clients, industry knowledge and connections, etc. AKA: unfair advantage.

The basic idea is that you should leverage what you’re already doing in your current job to try and grow your project as large as possible before going full-time on it, reducing your risk and increasing your likelihood of survival.

I did this by managing SEO at two well-known tech companies and then leveraging that for my business. Eduardo did the same, he was the lead content marketer at Teachable, and spent a year doing world-class content marketing and webinars. He leveraged all of that into everything we now do at ClickMinded.

Discipline

You learn a lot about yourself when you spend two years knowing that every day you have to wake up, go out there and drag it home every night.

I am probably the least-disciplined person I know, so I have no choice but to scam myself into doing stuff that I don’t want to do. The first “hack” to succeeding at this, is to pick something you actually want to work on. There are too many people out there working on businesses that they’re not genuinely interested in.

Related to discipline, is how you handle social media when working for yourself. I’ve tried to opt-out of social media as much as possible the last two years, even though I’ve been living a pretty ‘gram-worthy existence in some awesome places.

The reason why, is one that nobody likes to talk about, but we all kind of know is true deep down.

Using social media makes you sad.

There are all kinds of stuff out there that you can read on this topic, but this one from wait but why, on why millennials are unhappy is my favorite. In summary:

If you’re still using Facebook a lot, the single most important thing you could ever do is install the Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator plugin for Chrome.

Having your expectations artificially juiced all day brings me to my next point:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations

Looking back on when I was in San Francisco and getting ready to leave, I kind of screwed myself.

I liked my job and my friends, but I was sick and tired of the city. I was anxious to leave and I spent a lot of time working on my business and planning my escape.

This, in and of itself, became a weird, almost obsessive process, where I was planning and scheming for so long, that I actually became a little bit addicted to the act of planning for it.

I was so wrapped up in “thinking” about leaving, that when it actually came time to leave, I later discovered that I had created a completely impossible and unreasonable expectation of how it was going to go.

I set the bar so high for myself, that it became impossible to meet, and I pretty much guaranteed that I wouldn’t be happy.

I have heard that some people get like this when they are planning their wedding. They end up more interested in the planning than in actually marrying the person on the other end of it.

It turns out, that no matter how much you want something, if the time frame for realizing it is super long, your expectations for it will become absolutely ridiculous, and you can almost guarantee that you won’t be happy.

Money & Freedom

When you look at your business, and you think about how big it has gotten, as well as how big it could be, you start to ask questions that escalate quickly:

Right now, we love this business. We would probably be doing something similar if we weren’t doing this. Our customers are awesome and we like what we work on every day. For now, the plan is to keep working on this until we need an HR department.

If I have to start looking at company healthcare plans, sexual harassment policies, and a 401k match, I’m out.

If we’re lucky enough to grow ClickMinded to the point where it needs actual, functioning adults, we’ll just give it to some real people so they can go work on it.

When you get to this point where you’re doing long-term financial planning, you begin asking yourself how much you need, as well as what you would use the money for.

It turns out, you might not be looking for money. You might be looking for freedom.

The freedom to do what you want to do and go where you want to go and work on what you want to work on. Like how we spent 3 months making retro digital marketing strategy and seo strategy guides that look like those Nintendo Power magazines from the ’90s. Just ’cause.

If that’s what you’re going for, if freedom is “what the money is for”, you might be able to get there a lot faster than you think.

I know I did.

Self-Worth

It’s been interesting trying to explain to people what I do over the last two years.

When you think about this stuff all the time, and you spend every waking moment focusing on it, not only do you become obsessed with it, but you sort-of become obsessed with yourself.

me: I run a world-class digital marketing training course that focuses on teaching businesses, agencies, and entrepreneurs how to drive more traffic and customers to their website as quickly as possible.

other guy: Sir, this is an Arby’s.

It’s easy to get your identity wrapped up in your work. It can be a little bit scary, because it means that if the business is doing well, you’re doing well. And I have terrible news for you: there’s going to be many times when the business is not doing well.

I’ve also met a number of people over the last two years who became more obsessed with their identity as an entrepreneur than the business itself.

I’ve had a few friends ask for feedback on their side projects and businesses, and every time they asked, I was very direct with them. Too direct, actually.

I’ve found that many people starting something, aren’t actually looking for advice on how to build something new. They want to feel like they’re building something new. More specifically, they want to feel like they’re doing something meaningful with their time.

This is about to get a little preachy and weird, but I’ve met more people interested in giving meaning to their lives and finding their place in the universe, than those interested in actually starting and growing a new project or business.

Someone makes an eCommerce site or an Instagram account, and they say they want to launch a new brand. They start uploading selfies of themselves for “marketing”, and focus on things like business cards, logo designs and how many followers they have. Then you ask them basic questions like “What are you manufacturing?”, “How much does it cost to produce?” and “How will you get customers?”, and the entire strategy starts to break down. Sometimes, they get hostile.

They were never trying to start a business.

I’ve come to the realization that many people aren’t trying to build something big and “make it”. They’re trying to carve out their own little corner of the universe. They’re trying to figure out where they belong in the insanity of this mess we’re all in together.

The Single-Player Game

I’ve re-invented myself a couple of times over the last two years, and have had a couple of weird, philosophical changes in my thinking, caused primarily by three big things:

This is a little embarrassing, but this 3-minute video designed to be a teaser for the show literally changed my life:

Morty said it best:

“Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?”

Naval Ravikant did a guest appearance on the Farnam Street podcast, where he summarizes a mental model for living your life better than anyone else could, where he describes it as a “single-player game”:

“Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external monkey-player competitive game.

When it comes to learning to be happy, train yourself to be happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100% you’re competing against yourself, single-player game. We are such social creatures, we’re more like bees or ants, that we’re externally programmed and driven, that we just don’t know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore. We compete purely on multi-player games.

The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player.”

If you’re not curled up in a ball crying yet, bare with me.

He’s basically saying:

It’s all single-player.

At first, I thought that this was the most terrifying and depressing possible conclusion you could ever come to. It’s unacceptable. How could anyone live their life with this hanging over them the entire time?

I refused to accept it.

“3 generations and I’m gone from everyone’s memory? There’s no way this is possible”.

But there’s a very easy way to test this.

How often do you think about your great-grandparents?

Who were they? Where did they live? What did they do with their lives, and most importantly, how often do you think about them?

…. yeah.

According to Naval, it’s 3 generations and you’re toast, pal. Like you never existed to begin with. Completely wiped from the world’s memory.

This is the most profound mindfuck I’ve ever come across. I’m not sure if I’m fully on board yet. But, if you choose to accept it, it’s a real Rorschach test for how you want to live the rest of your life.

You can take it as either the most crushing, terrifying truth imaginable, or the greatest possible gift you could have ever been given.

For me, it’s been akin to waking up in the middle of a dream and realizing that no one is going to remember you at the end of it, so you might as well do whatever the fuck you want until it’s over.

There’s basically only two choices:

You can either opt-out, or strap the fuck in, and participate in the absurdity of this miracle we have all been given.

That’s a Wrap

YIKES. That escalated quickly. How did we go from SEO to the meaning of life that fast?

Anyways, that’s how the last two years went down. Thanks for reading.

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SEO Weather: Welcome to the ClickMinded Family!

Hey gang – we recently acquired SEO Weather, a suite of digital marketing tools. If you’re reading this page, you’re probably very familiar with it.

We decided that it would be a great addition to ClickMinded, and we’ve moved these tools over to our site while we work on improving them. 

We hope you are as excited about this as we are! You can access the full suite SEO Weather suite of tools here: 

Domain Authority Checker

This domain authority checker will let you bulk check the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of a list of URLs. Simply enter your list of URLs into the text area and click “Go Fetch”.

URL Trim Tool

This simple tool will let you trim a bunch of URLs to the root domain and also standardize the prefixes. That way, you can modify your URLs so they are either with or without http and www.

Google Analytics Code Generator

If you need to track an event that doesn’t have a confirmation page, use onClick event tracking. This Google Analytics event tracking generator will give you the code you need to use. Compatible with both Asynchronous and Universal Analytics.

Google Cache Search: View Cached Pages

The Google cache search tool will let you easily view cached pages and websites in Google’s search index. You’ll be able to view the content of the page as it was last cached.

SEO Checklist

If you’re trying to find an exact, step-by-step SEO checklist that you can use immediately, you’re going to love this post. It’s a very direct, straightforward process that will drive more traffic and more customers to your website as quickly as possible.

Digital Marketing Strategy Template

This template will give you the step-by-step process you need to create a social media calendar that helps you attract more traffic, leads, and sales from social media.

Mobile Game Marketing Strategy

This is a comprehensive overview of everything you need for your mobile game’s marketing strategy.

The Complete 51-Point SEO Checklist For 2024

SEO Checklist Overview

The first thing most people do when they see our checklist for the first time, is freak out.

Don’t do that!

It might look long, technical and overwhelming, but I promise you it’s not that bad. You should think about everything on this SEO checklist as incrementally beneficial. Try to get as many of them as you can, but don’t worry too much if you miss a few. We don’t know anyone that’s been able to do every single thing on this list, and that’s OK.

Download PDF version below and so you can keep track of everything over the next few days.

Chapter 1: SEO Basics

First, let’s go over the mandatory seo tools and plugins you’ll need to increase your organic traffic for your webpage.

Set Up Google Tag Manager

Although it’s not strictly an SEO tool, Google Tag Manager (GTM) will make your life easier as a digital marketer.

With GTM, you can easily deploy code on your site—which you’ll need to set up the other tools on this checklist—without needing to learn how to code or contact a developer.

It’s really simple:

  1. Select the type of code you want to add (it includes some pre-built options like Google Analytics)
  2. Add code details (e.g. for Google Analytics, just add your tracking ID)
  3. Choose where to trigger the code.

Here are some resources to help you set up Google Tag Manager:

Set Up Google Search Console

Search Console is a free tool provided by Google to website owners and SEOs.

You will get a ton of useful data about your search engine rankings and traffic and helpful tools:

Plus, Search Console is how you get communications from Google about:

Search console is a must for anyone doing SEO for Google (basically everyone).

Here are some resources to help you set up Google Search Console:

Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is how you’ll link your SEO efforts to your bottom line.

For SEO, you’ll be able to track things like:

Plus, you can connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics and perform analysis that mixes both data sources.

Here are some resources to help you set up Google Analytics:

Using WordPress? Install Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that makes it incredibly easy for you to create SEO-friendly content.

Most of the time, you’ll use Yoast to update your pages’ titles, meta descriptions, and slugs.

But Yoast also takes care of things like canonical tags, noindex tags, and sitemaps for you.

ProTip: Yoast includes a simple content analysis with improvement recommendations. A lot of beginners stress out too much about this—I recommend not paying attention to it at all.

Here are some resources to help you set up Yoast SEO:

Chapter 2: Keyword Research Checklist

Keyword research is the process of discovering keyword opportunities that can generate massive traffic and sales for your business. You have to get this right even before you start working on optimizing your site.

Understand Searcher Intent

This is fundamental to getting a positive ROI for your business from SEO.

If you want to provide answers to people’s questions, you need to begin by understanding what people are searching for.

For example, let’s say you run a website (there are plenty of free website builders you could use) for a boxing gym, and the keyword “learning box” is searched for 8,100 times per month.

It seems like a great opportunity to attract people who want to learn how to box, right?

Wrong.

If you didn’t understand the intent behind “learning box”, you would’ve wasted any time and resources trying to rank your boxing gym website for that keyword.

To learn more about the searcher intent behind a keyword, just Google it and check out the results that show up.

Here’s a resource to help you understand searcher intent:

Understand How Keywords Fit into Your Sales Funnel

Not all keywords will have the same value to your business.

Some keywords will attract more traffic, but others will be more likely to convert users. Use keywords wisely, while looking for a healthy balance.

Here’s how you might map some keywords against the sales funnel of a website for bachelorette parties.

If you didn’t do this, you might be tempted to dismiss some keywords with lower search volumes if you don’t realize that they are more likely to convert visitors into customers.

Here are some resources to help you understand keywords and the sales funnel:

Understand Search Volumes

This is a topic of a lot of debate between SEOs and SEO software tools.

To prepare your keyword strategy, you’ll often use search volumes as one of the main metrics to prioritize new content ideas and optimize your site.

What you’ll find in most keyword research tools represents an estimate of the monthly search volume—i.e. how many times a certain keyword is searched for each month.

The problem is, search volumes will vary depending on the tool you use:

The trick is to not spend ANY time trying to figure out which figure is correct (different tools will have different sources of data).

Instead, think of search volumes as relative metrics instead of absolute.

From the data above, you could conclude that “flowers” is 4 to 7 times more popular than “flower delivery”.

Just pick a keyword research tool you like and don’t take the search volume numbers literally.

Understand Keyword Difficulty

If you find a keyword that’s relevant to your business, the next step is to figure out if you can compete for its traffic.

Not all keywords will be as easy (or difficult) to rank for.

Most keyword research tools (except for Google’s Keyword Planner) include a metric for how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword.

Each tool has its own way of calculating this—so stick to one tool when comparing difficulty between keywords.

Higher difficulty means that you will need to work harder to rank for that keyword—this means writing better content than competitors, building more links, fixing technical issues, and everything else included in this checklist.

Understand Head Terms vs Long Tail Keywords

You’ll soon realize SEOs talk a lot about head terms vs long-tail keywords.

Head terms are keywords that:

Long-tail keywords are the opposite of head terms, they:

It’s hard to tell what someone searching for the keyword “backpack” is looking for—it might be anything from the picture of a backpack to a backpackers’ hostel.

On the other hand, someone searching for “best carry on backpack 2018” is definitely in a consideration/buying mindset.

ProTip: a single page can rank for hundreds of different keywords, so a page on your site could rank for both head terms and long-tail keywords.

Use a Keyword Research Tool

For years, SEOs relied on Google’s Keyword Planner to perform keyword research—it was the tool I recommended for years.

For several reasons, I now recommend using third-party tools (and experts agree).

My favorite one is KWFinder (affiliate link) for its friendly user interface (although I also recommend ahrefs).

Both of these tools offer similar features that let you discover valuable keywords:

Here are some resources to help you perform keyword research like a pro:

Chapter 3: On-Page SEO Checklist

Search engines can’t understand content as easily as humans… yet. On-page optimization is everything you do to help search engines understand that your content is a relevant answer to people’s search queries. Here’s how to do that

Include Your Target Keyword in the URL

The very first thing that Google sees on your website is the URL. Search engines crawl your URL even before the content of your page. By putting keywords in your URL, you are signaling Google about the type of information your page will give to searchers.

This is the first thing Google sees—even before the content of your page.

When you include your keyword in the URL, you’re sending Google a signal of what your page is about.

If you are creating a page about red running shoes, a good example would be to use: www.yourwebsite.com/red-running-shoes.

A bad example would be something like www.yourwebsite.com/post/2981-1, which doesn’t give us (or search engines) any clue of what the page is about.

Warning: There are very serious consequences to changing a URL that already has authority. Don’t do this if your page already has links!

Keep Your URLs Short

It can be tempting to stuff your URLs with as many keywords as possible—avoid this!

Research has shown that shorter URLs tend to rank higher than long ones.

Here’s a helpful article on how to optimize your URLs:

Add Your Keyword to Your Title Tag

Title tags are still one of the most powerful important elements of on-page SEO.

The title tag is what people will see when they search on Google.

That’s why you should include your target keyword in the title tag.

If you use WordPress, you can edit your easily edit your page title with the Yoast SEO plugin.

In general, try to include your keyword closer to the beginning of the sentence and keep the entire title under 52 characters.

Here are some resources to help you optimize your title tags:

Optimize Your Title for Organic CTR

If more people click on your page vs other websites on the SERPs, it gives Google algorithm an indication that your page might be a better answer to people’s questions than those other sites.

This is called organic clickthrough rate (CTR): the percentage of people who click on your page divided by everyone who sees it.

That’s why it’s not enough to just include the keyword in there.

Your title tag needs to be eye-catching and entice searchers to click on it.

A good idea when crafting your title is to look at what your competitors are doing…

…and come up with something better. Some best practices include:

Use Google Search Console to find and track the CTR of your pages for specific keywords.

Here are some resources to help you increase the CTR of your title tags:

Add Your Keyword to Your Meta Description and Make it Compelling

The content of the meta description is no longer used by search engines as a ranking signal.

However, writing a compelling meta description and including your keyword in it can help with your CTR.

Plus, Google highlights the keyword the user searched if it’s included in the meta description.

Here are some resources to help you optimize your meta descriptions:

Add Your Keyword to Your H1 Tag, and Make Sure to Only Use One

Even though the value of the H2, H3,…, H6 tags for SEO is debatable, it is still generally a good idea to include your primary keyword in your H1 tag.

Make sure there is only one H1 on the entire page and that it appears before any other heading tag.

Include Your Keyword in the Body of the Page

Use your keyword at least 3 times in the body of your page, and try to do it once close to the top of the page.

You can see how we did that for our on-page optimization tutorial, which we’re optimizing for the term “on-page seo”.

Plus, make sure to have at least 100 words on each URL (minimum – the more the better).

You can still rank with fewer words, and you don’t ever want to put unnecessary text on your site, but I recommend not creating a new page unless you have roughly ~100 words worth of content (500+ is ideal).

Use Synonyms in your Copy

Search engines are becoming better at understanding human language.

This means you can use more natural language and still stay relevant to the target keywords you are trying to rank for.

Check out how we use synonyms in our UTM tracking tutorial.

Synonyms are great, and using natural language that’s influenced by keyword research (rather than just pure keywords) is highly encouraged.

If you want to learn more about synonyms in SEO, check out the article below:

Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords in Your Copy

Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is a method used to determine context.

For example, some LSI keywords for the term “new york city” might be:

Including keywords that are thematically related to your primary keyword can help search engines understand what the content of your page is about.

LSI Graph is a great free tool to find these keywords.

Just input your target keyword and get a list of LSI keywords.

Include these keywords in your content whenever it makes sense.

Here are some resources for LSI keywords:

Optimize the Readability of Your Content

A page bounce (i.e. people who land on your page from search engine results page and leave your site without engaging) can send a negative signal to search engine.

On the other hand, if you manage to keep visitors engaged (reading your content and clicking through more pages of your site), you’ll send a signal to Google that your content is relevant.

Some best practices to optimize the readability of your site include:

For example, we followed these guidelines for our email marketing strategy guide:

And received great feedback from our readers:

Here are some resources to help you write better content:

Optimize Your Images

Search engines “see” images by reading the ALT tag and looking at file names, among other factors.

Try to be descriptive when you name your images (but don’t overdo it!)

Here’s a helpful guide on image optimization:

Build Internal Links

When page A on your site gets linked from another site (aka an external link, or backlink), its authority increases.

If you add a link from page A to another on your site, page B (aka an internal link), some of the authority from page A passes to page B.

That’s why it’s a good idea to add links to other pages of your site whenever it makes sense.

For example, notice how we link to our page about adding the Facebook Pixel to a WordPress Site inside our Digital Advertising Strategy Guide.

ProTip: the anchor text, or text you use to link, also matters, so try to include your keyword in there and avoid generic phrases like “click here” or “this post”.

Avoid using keywords in global navigation, though, as that can look like over-optimization. Stick to in-content links instead.

Here are some resources to help you with internal linking:

Link to Authoritative Sites

This is a controversial tactic, but it’s one of my favorite ones.

I’ve found that whenever I link to authoritative websites it helps my own rankings (even if I’m competing against them).

You can find this tactic in most of our content.

For example, in our social media strategy guide, we link to sites we are competing against.

If you run your own website or can get buy-in from your boss to link to bigger competitors, I definitely recommend doing this.

Chapter 4: Link Building Checklist

Link building, or off-page optimization, is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase your rankings. I’m not going to lie, link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO. But there are a few tactics you can use to gain easy links (see the easy link opportunities below).

Understand Authority Metrics

To determine which page ranks above all others, search engines rely heavily on the authority of pages and websites.

In SEO, authority is mainly determined by links—more specifically, links from other sites to yours.

Here are a few general rules for how the authority is calculated:

Search engines don’t publish authority metrics, but several tools have developed their own metrics.

For example, here’s how authority metrics look if you’re using ahrefs:

UR is short for URL Rating and DR is short for Domain Rating—ahrefs’ own metrics for the authority of a page and a website, respectively.

BONUS: Use the ClickMinded domain authority checker to do this.

In general, here’s how you should think about authority:

Of course, you’ll find this is often not the case—just use authority metrics as a broad guideline, not a hard fact.

Easy Link Opportunity #1: Reach Out to Friends/Colleagues

Do you have friends, family, colleagues, or previous employers who run a website?

If it makes sense, you can reach out to them and ask them to add a link to your site.

A lot of people are too afraid or ashamed to ask—get over that and just ask!

In my experience, this is one of the easiest ways to get links to your site.

Easy Link Opportunity #2: Unlinked Mentions

Once your business (or yourself) start being noticed, you’ll often find people including mentions to your business without links.

Just reach out to these people and ask them to include a link along with the mention.

Here’s a link we got from a brand mention on the ConversionXL blog.

To find unlinked brand mentions:

  1. Start with doing a search for all your current existing unlinked mentions using a tool like ahrefs and reach out to all of those.
  1. Implement alerts on Google Alerts or ahrefs for on-going mentions of your brand (and related terms like your own name or names of products) and reach out to new mentions as they happen.

Here are some resources to help you build links from unlinked mentions:

Easy Link Opportunity #3: Fix Broken Inbound Links

If your site has been around for a while with no one paying too much attention to SEO…

…you’re going to find broken links.

If the destination of a link returns an error code, that’s a broken link.

From a technical SEO standpoint, it’s a good idea to fix these URLs.

But it’s urgent to do this if other websites are linking to those broken URLs.

You can use ahref’s broken backlinks report to find these:

A URL might be broken for several reasons:

Your options can be:

Do whatever you need to do to avoid having broken backlinks.

Here are some resources to help you fix broken backlinks:

Reverse-Engineer Your Competitors’ Links

Finding people who will be willing to link to your content can seem challenging.

But there’s an easy way to do this.

Your competitors (aka people who are already ranking for the keyword you’re targeting) already managed to get people to link to them.

Why not start there?

For example, let’s say you want to rank for “how to make apple pie”:

  1. Look for the top pages ranking for that keyword
  2. Copy and paste the URLs into ahref’s site explorer
  3. Open the backlinks report

Every one of those is a link opportunity for your site.

Click on each opportunity and reverse engineer the backlink:

When you reach out to these people, remember to always give people a meaningful and compelling reason to link to your content.

Here are some resources to help you reverse engineer competitor’s links:

Guest Post on Relevant Sites

Back in 2014, Google cracked down on spammy guest posting as a link building practice.

Does this mean guest blogging doesn’t work anymore?

No.

If you write high-quality guest posts on relevant websites and add links to your site in a natural (not spammy) way, guest blogging can be a great way to build links.

For example, here’s a post I published a while ago in the Moz blog:

I included a link to this site in the body.

It’s a helpful post, published in a relevant site in my industry, with a non-spammy link to my site.

An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to search Google using advanced search operators.

Try these searches for your target keyword:

Reach out to the blogs or websites that make sense, it may be a good idea to have a few post pitches prepared beforehand.

ProTip: if you have already guest posted on other sites, send over examples along with your pitch to build some credibility.

Here are some resources to help you build links through guest blogging:

PS – If you haven’t created your own yet, make sure to check out this great guide on how to start a blog.

Use Resource Page Link Building

Resource pages are curated lists that link to helpful content, resources, or tools.

In other words, they are designed to provide links to other sites.

Check out this link we got from Advanced Web Ranking on a page about the best resources to learn SEO.

Just reach out to authors of these resource pages and ask them to include your content or page in it.

You can find these opportunities in Google by using advanced search operators:

Try these searches for your target keyword:

Here are some resources to help you build links from resource pages:

Get Interviewed on Podcasts

Podcasts are growing in popularity and many people are jumping into the channel.

What most people don’t realize is that this is a massive link building opportunity (credit to Brian Dean from Backlinko, who wrote about this tactic on his blog).

Aside from Spotify, iTunes, and Stitcher, people usually publish their podcast episodes as posts on websites, along with the show notes.

So whenever you appear on a podcast, you’ll likely get a link back to your site.

Come up with a compelling story that’s relevant to podcasts in your niche and pitch it to them.

You can use Chartable’s charts to find podcasts in your industry.

Here’s a great guide on how to appear on podcasts:

Get Media Mentions With HARO

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a daily newsletter that will send you requests from reporters, authors, and publishers who want to write stories.

This is how a request might look like:

If you can’t afford or don’t have time to do PR, this is an easy way to get media mentions.

Check out this link we got via a HARO request:

Here are some links to help you get started:

Provide Testimonials for Your Favorite Tools, Services, or Companies

Convincing someone to link to you is always a challenge—it’s particularly hard to not come off as trying to use other people’s websites to promote your own business.

That’s why I like this tactic.

Instead of being self-promotional, this tactic is about helping others promote their business.

If there’s a tool, service, or company you like that includes testimonials on their site, you can write a review for them to publish it.

Often times (not always!) you’ll get a link to your landing page along with that.

Use Broken Link Building

Remember how I mentioned “Fix Broken Inbound Links” as an easy link opportunity?

When other websites don’t fix their broken inbound links, and this happens a lot for larger websites, that’s an opportunity for you.

There are several approaches to finding these broken links:

Approach #1: Use a Chrome extension

You can use a Chrome extension like Check My Links to try to find broken links in pages.

Approach #2: Find broken inbound links to your competitors

Grab your biggest competitors and use ahrefs to find all their broken inbound links.

Approach #3: Find broken outbound links on authoritative sites in your niche

If there’s an authoritative website in your niche you want to get links from, you can scrape their site to find broken outbound links.

ahrefs is also a great tool for this, but you can also use something free like Screaming Frog.

Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to provide websites with an alternative to link to.

You can use Wayback Machine to find what the content of a broken URL was before it was taken down or removed.

Understand what the content was, create something better or more up-to-date, and reach out to people linking to it letting them know they have a broken link (and you have something they can easily substitute it with).

Here are some great resources on how to build links through broken links:

Chapter 5: Technical SEO Checklist

Technical SEO is everything you do to make it easier for search engines to find your website. Technical issues can prevent your site from ranking and getting organic traffic.

Fix Crawl Errors

Crawl errors are those preventing Google from viewing your content.

You can find them using the Coverage report in Google Search Console.

Fix all the errors you find in this report and monitor Search Console to fix new issues as they come up.

Here are great resources on fixing crawl errors:

Fix Broken Links

Broken links on your site send a bad signal to Google.

A site with a lot of broken backlinks is probably not up-to-date and unlikely to provide a valuable answer to searchers.

You should try to avoid having broken links on your site.

To find broken links, you can use Screaming Frog or ahrefs.

Switch to HTTPS

In an effort to make the web “safer” for users, Google has made a push for more websites to use HTTPS.

So you might see a small ranking boost by switching from HTTP to HTTPS.

ProTip: if you’re starting a new site, you should use HTTPS right away and save yourself the trouble of switching later on.

Here are great resources that might come in handy when switching to HTTPS:

Make Sure Your Site Doesn’t Have Duplicate Content

Duplicate content issues happen when two or more URLs on your site are identical or very similar.

This can dilute the SEO value of your content among several URLs.

Use 301 redirects, canonical tags or use Google Search Console to fix any duplicate content that might be indexing and penalizing your site.

Here are great resources to help you deal with duplicate content

Fix Any Missing or Duplicate Meta Tags

Missing or duplicate meta tags (title and meta description) can hurt your site.

Screaming Frog is my favorite tool to find these:

Once you’ve identified the URLs with issues, just head over to Yoast (if you’re using WordPress) and fix them.

Here are some resources to help you deal with duplicate or missing meta tags:

Fix Bad Redirects

There are 2 common issues with redirects:

Common issue #1: 302s that should be 301s

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and passes almost all SEO value from the old page to the new one. This is a good redirect.

A 302 is a temporary redirect. It’s used for site maintenance or time-specific promotions. The SEO value of the redirected page is not passed to the new destination.

Use Screaming Frog to crawl your site and find 302 redirects:

Replace (almost all) 302 redirects with 301 redirects.

Common issue #2: redirect chains

The more redirects Google has to go through to find a URL, the less value is passed from the original URL.

A redirect chain might look like:

  1. www.yourwebsite.com/page-1 redirects to www.yourwebsite.com/page-2
  2. www.yourwebsite.com/page-2 redirects to www.yourwebsite.com/page-3

Instead of having to pass through www.yourwebsite.com/page-2, it’s better to just do this in one step:

  1. www.yourwebsite.com/page-1 redirects to www.yourwebsite.com/page-3

Use Screaming Frog’s redirect chain report to find these:

Here are some resources to help you fix bad redirects:

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches.  Here’s an additional guide on Local SEO if you want to learn how to optimize your e-commerce for local search.

Plus, Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile (not the desktop) version of your site to crawl and index it.

They are basically saying: “if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank highly on Google”.

You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check your site:

If you’re using a CMS (like WordPress, Squarespace, or Shopify), use or switch to a responsive theme.

Speed Up Your Site

Search engines value sites that provide a good user experience and the speed of your site is a huge factor.

A slow page load will increase your bounce rate, as visitors lose patience and leave.

Many tools offer speed tests along with suggestions on how to make your site faster.

ProTip: It’s super easy to get caught up in trying to fix all of these speed issues and getting a perfect score. DON’T do this—in general, try to fix the ones you can easily fix in a day or less, and then move on.

Here are some tools you can use to make your site faster:

Create an XML Sitemap and Submit it to Google Search Console

An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all the pages that you want to be indexed.

You can use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap to Google:

If you’re using Yoast SEO, the plugin will take care of your sitemap and update it automatically.

If you’re not using Yoast, you can crawl your site with Screaming Frog and use it to generate a sitemap.

Here are some resources you can use to create and submit your sitemap:

Create a robots.txt File

A robots.txt file, together with your XML sitemap, will specify what actions crawlers are allowed to do on each page on your site.

You can control how a search engine crawls and indexes your site by including one in the top-level directory.

For example, you can block Google from crawling your WordPress login URL:

These directions can be specified for different types of crawlers, allowing you to establish different protocols for different search engines.

Here are some resources you can use to create and test your robots.txt file:

Use Schema Markup

One SEO tool which can help you understand your content better is Schema Markup. However, manually installing schema is a bit hectic.

You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Rich Results Test, which makes work a lot easier.

Chapter 6: Tracking & More

These are some extra stuff you might want to check out now that you’ve gone through the rest of the items on this checklist.

Set Up Rank Tracking

Whenever I start working on an SEO project, one of the first things I do is set up rank tracking.

Doing this will allow you to easily monitor your website’s rankings among dozens or hundreds of keywords.

Tracking your rankings lets you know whether your efforts are paying off.

These are the tools I like for rank tracking:

Set Up Link Monitoring

It’s a good idea to set up link monitoring to know if your piece of content is earning links or if your link-building campaigns are working.

Link monitoring tools will crawl the internet looking for links to your site and let you know whenever there’s a new link (or a change on existing links).

These are the tools I like for link monitoring:

Claim Your Brand Name on as Many Social Networks as Possible

For reputation management reasons, not only do you want to make sure no one else gets your account name, but you can often own all the results on the first page of a search for your brand if you’re a new website or company.

You can use NameChk to help with that.

Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools

If you are in the US market, Bing is somewhat relevant in terms of share of search engine traffic.

Bing Webmaster Tools, is the equivalent to Google’s Search Console for Microsoft’s search engine.

Use an SEO Audit Tool to Double-Check Everything

Performing an SEO audit manually is time-consuming and complicated. Fortunately, there are SEO auditing tools that can help with the process.

These will speed up the process, identifying errors and offering solutions. This allows you to spend more of your time working on overall seo strategy, instead of weeding out broken links.

ProTip: Remember that all of these are automated tools—they are good, but can sometimes recommend the wrong things and they are no substitute for a professional SEO. Always use your own judgment when checking automated reports.

Here are a few tools you can use to audit your site:

Avoid Meta Keywords

A lot of shady SEOs will say you should use meta keywords.

Stay as far away from these people as possible.

Meta keywords are dead and will do nothing for you other than waste your time.

To learn more about this read: Meta Keywords: The Internet’s Saddest Little Meta Tag ;(

Using a Domain Someone Else Owned? Check Cached Pages

Did you buy your domain from someone else? Or did someone else use your domain previously, and then let it expire? There’s a chance that they may have had content on the site that isn’t at all relevant to what your topic is today. Use this tool to view cached pages in Google and find out.

Earn Your SEO Certification

ClickMinded is an SEO training course that teaches you exactly how to increase traffic to any website, as quickly as possible.

The course includes a final exam. Take the course, pass the final exam, and you’ll earn your SEO certification. It integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn.

ClickMinded certifications are designed to show future employers and clients that you understand how search engine optimization fundamentally works. We also have a digital marketing certification and a social media marketing certification.

Sidenote: we are very open about the fact that certifications don’t mean that someone is good at SEO (or digital marketing)—but some people still want them for various reasons, so we offer them.

Once you’re confident in your SEO abilities and you’re producing results for yourself, your company, or your clients, show them off with our free SEO report template. Of course, if doing SEO yourself is a little out of your reach, you can always hire an SEO/SEM agency.

In Conclusion

You’re now well prepared to start optimizing your site and massively increase your organic traffic from search. Enter your email below to download this checklist as a PDF.

Some other SEO Checklists that you can check out are:

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The Complete 32-Point Squarespace SEO Checklist for 2024

This checklist can be applied to any site built with Squarespace to increase your traffic and search engine rankings as quickly as possible.

You certainly will not be able to go through this step-by-step Squarespace SEO checklist in a single day, and that’s OK.

Download the PDF version below so you can keep track of what is done over the next few days.

Squarespace SEO Overview

First, let’s go over the mandatory tools and plugins you’ll need to optimize your Squarespace sites.

Set Up Google Tag Manager

Although it’s not strictly an SEO tool, Google Tag Manager (GTM) will make your life easier as a digital marketer.

With GTM, you can easily deploy code on your site—which you’ll need to set up other tools on this Squarespace SEO checklist—without needing to learn how to code or contact a developer.

Google Tag Manager is simple:

  1. Select the type of code you want to add (this includes some pre-built options like Google Analytics)
  2. Add code details (e.g. for Google Analytics, just add your tracking ID)
  3. Choose where to trigger the code
  4. Publish your changes—the new code will be automatically added to your Squarespace site.

Here’s a simple guide to help you set up Google Tag Manager:

Set Up Google Search Console

Search Console is a free webmaster tool created by Google for website owners. It provides useful data about your website’s performance in Google’s search results.

For example:

Plus, Search Console is useful to perform technical SEO tasks like:

Finally, Search Console is how you get communications from Google about:

Search Console is a must-have tool for your Squarespace site.

Here’s a resource to help you set up Google Search Console:

Install Google Analytics

If you haven’t installed Google Analytics yet—stop everything else you’re doing and do this instead.

With Google Analytics you’ll be able to determine how your SEO efforts are impacting the performance of your website.

You can use Google Analytics to learn things like:

Plus, you can connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics and perform analysis that mixes both data sources.

Here are some resources to help you set up Google Analytics:

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important element of SEO. You need to have a solid keyword strategy before you even start optimizing your Squarespace site.

Learn the Basics of Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of understanding what people are searching for in Google, Bing, and other search engines.

You can use keyword research to discover massive opportunities, prioritize your content plan, and even make budget decisions.

To do this, you just need to understand 3 concepts: search volume, keyword difficulty, and searcher intent.

Search volume is an estimate of how many times a search term (keyword) is searched for each month.

Search volumes allow you to compare search keywords based on how popular they are. You can use this information to know what to write and NOT write about.

For example, if you have a blog about tennis, keyword research would allow you to know that it’s a much better idea to write a post about “tennis tips” than about “tennis techniques”.

Keyword difficulty is a calculation offered by some tools about how easy (or difficult) it is to rank for a certain search term.

You can use keyword difficulty as a second filter for the target keywords you select.

For example, let’s say you run a website that reviews sports apparel. If you relied exclusively on search volume to prioritize your search keywords, you would choose to pursue “soccer cleats” over “football cleats”—after all, it has 65% more searches per month. However, it’s almost 3 times more difficult to rank “soccer cleats” than it is to rank “football cleats”.

If you’re running a small business website, it will be easier and faster for you to get Search Engine Optimization or SEO traffic for “football cleats”.

Searcher intent refers to figuring out what the user was looking for when they typed a specific keyword into Google. This sounds obvious but it can save you from wasting a lot of time and effort.

If you own a website about baseball and looked at the data above, it would look like a great opportunity to create a page dedicated to baseball bats made of metal, right?

However, when you look at the search for the search term “metal bat”, all the results are about a character from an anime series.

This simple check tells you that you probably won’t be able to rank for that term, and even if you did, people looking for “metal bats” are not looking for baseball bats.

Use a Keyword Research Tool

For years, people relied on Google’s Keyword Planner to perform keyword research.

However, it has become unfriendly and less reliable in the last few years. Most SEOs today rely on third-party tools instead.

Our favorite tools at ClickMinded are KWFinder (affiliate link) and ahrefs—both of these include:

Map Your Keywords Against Your Sales Funnel

Different keywords will serve different purposes for your business. This depends on which part of your sales funnel each target keyword belongs to.

Top of the funnel keywords will typically have higher search volumes but have less commercial intent behind them. People searching for these terms are just looking for information and are not necessarily ready to buy.

Keywords at the middle of the funnel have less volume than the top of the funnel keywords, but people searching for these terms are already considering their options for products, sellers, or brands.

Keywords at the bottom of the funnel usually have the lowest search volume but high commercial intent. People searching for these terms are ready to become customers. Your keyword strategy should look to balance keywords for each stage of the funnel.

Top of the funnel keywords will attract most of your traffic, while the bottom of the funnel keywords will generate the most revenue for your business.

Here’s how you might map some keywords against the sales funnel of a website selling tea.

If you didn’t do this, you might be tempted to dismiss some keywords with lower search volumes until you realize that they are more likely to convert visitors into customers.

Here are some resources to help you understand keywords and the sales funnel:

Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization happens when several blog post URLs or web pages on your site are competing for the same target keyword.

You should target each keyword (and related search terms) with a single URL or page.

For example, if you have a blog post that’s ranking for the keyword “best organic coffee” and attracting good traffic, you should avoid optimizing another page for the same keyword.

On-Page SEO

Google algorithm can’t understand content as easily as humans. On-page optimization is the process of helping search engines understand what your content is about to get higher rankings.

Include Your Target Keyword in the URL

This is the first thing Google sees—even before the content of your page.

In fact, Google has started to give more relevance to URLs by moving them to the top of each search result.

When you include your target keyword in the page URL, you’re sending Google a signal of what your page is about.

If you are creating a page about red running shoes, a good example would be to use: www.yourwebsite.com/red-running-shoes.

A bad example would be something like www.yourwebsite.com/post/2981-1, which doesn’t give us (or search engines) any clue of what the web page content is about.

To optimize your URLs, you should:

Warning: There are very serious consequences to changing a URL that already has authority. Don’t do this if your page already has links!

You can edit your URLs in Squarespace in the “Options” tab while editing your pages or posts:

Keep Your URLs Short

It can be tempting to stuff your URLs with as many keywords as possible—avoid this!

Research has shown that shorter URLs tend to rank higher than long ones.

Here’s a helpful article on how to optimize your URLs:

Add Your Keyword to Your Title Tag

Title tags are still one of the most powerful important elements of on-page SEO.

The site title tag is what people will see when they search on Google.

That’s why you should include your target keyword in the title tag.

In Squarespace, you can edit your page title in the SEO tab while editing your pages or posts.

In general, try to include your keyword closer to the beginning of the sentence and keep the entire title under 52 characters.

Here’s a great resource to help you optimize your title tags and create an SEO title.

Optimize Your Title for Organic CTR

If more people click on your page vs other websites in the search engine results page, it gives Google bots an indication that your page might be a better answer to people’s queries than those other sites.

This is called organic clickthrough rate (CTR): the percentage of people who click on your page divided by everyone who sees it.

That’s why it’s not enough to just include the keyword in there. Your title tag needs to be eye-catching and entice searchers to click on it.

A good idea when crafting your title is to look at what your competitors are doing…

…and come up with something better.

Some best practices include:

Use Google Search Console to find and track the CTR of your pages for target keywords.

Here are some resources to help you increase the CTR of your title tags:

Add Your Keyword to Your Meta Description and Make it Compelling

The meta/seo description is the snippet of text that appears in search results below the page title.

Even though the meta description is no longer a ranking factor, it can indirectly help you get higher rankings by increasing your CTR. Plus, Google highlights the keyword the user searched if it’s included in the meta description.

In your Squarespace site, you can edit your meta descriptions in the SEO tab while editing your pages or posts.

Here are some resources to help you optimize your meta descriptions:

Include Your Keywords in the Copy of Your Pages

This one’s pretty straightforward. Include your keywords in the site description of the page you’re optimizing.

We recommend including the keyword in the h1 heading of the page and again in the body near the top of the page.

Don’t overdo it, though. Getting your exact keyword in there 2 or 3 times is probably good enough.

Try reading your text out loud—if it sounds weird, then you should probably dial it down a bit.

Include Synonyms and LSI Keywords in Your Text

Aside from including your exact keyword, it’s helpful to throw in some synonyms and LSI keywords. Both help provide more context to search engines about what’s the topic of a page.

LSI keywords are terms that are thematically related to a keyword.

For example, a synonym of “NYC” could be “New York City” and an LSI keyword could be “Empire State Building” or “Statue of Liberty”.

To find synonyms or LSI keywords, you can use Thesaurus and LSIGraph.

Optimize Your Pages for Higher Engagement

Google’s entire business model relies on being able to provide relevant results to people’s searches. That’s why a lot of SEOs believe that Google has started to use engagement metrics to help determine whether a piece of content is relevant to a searcher or not.

It’s simple: if a searcher spends time on your page and interacts with it, Google can assume that the information shown to that user was relevant.

Some best practices to optimize the engagement of your content include:

For example, we followed these guidelines for our email marketing strategy guide:

And received great feedback from our readers:

Here are some resources to help you write better content:

Optimize Your Images

Search engines “see” images by reading the ALT tag and looking at file names, among other factors.

Optimizing the images in your Squarespace store is a 2-step process.

First, use a descriptive name for the image file before you upload it to your site.

Second, edit the alt text of your image file inside the Squarespace admin—the best practice is to write a short SEO description of the image.

The process to edit image alt text in Squarespace varies depending on the type of image. Here’s a quick tutorial for each image type.

Add Internal Links

When you add a link from “page A” to another on your site, “page B”, that’s called an internal link.

Internal links are helpful for SEO for 3 reasons:

  1. They can pass some of the SEO value from the homepage or one web page to the other
  2. They can help Google bots understand the content of a page
  3. They can help users find other relevant content on your site (increasing engagement)

For example, notice how we link to our page about adding the Facebook Pixel to a WordPress Site inside our Digital Advertising Strategy Guide.

Here are some resources to help you with internal linking:

Link Building

Link building is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase your rankings. This is one of the hardest parts of SEO, but there are a few tactics that are proven to work for most websites.

To determine which pages to rank above all others, search engines rely heavily on the authority of pages and websites.

In SEO, authority is mainly determined by links—more specifically, links from other sites to yours.

Here are a few general rules for how the authority is calculated:

These are some tactics you can use to build links to your website site.

Find Unlinked Mentions

Once your business starts being noticed, you’ll often find people including mentions to your business without links.

Just reach out to these people and ask them to include a link along with the mention.

To find unlinked brand mentions:

Start with doing a search for all your current existing unlinked mentions using a tool like ahrefs and reach out to all of those.

Then, implement alerts on Google Alerts or ahrefs for on-going mentions of your brand (and related terms like your own name or names of products) and reach out to new mentions as they happen.

Here are some resources to help you build links from unlinked mentions:

Fix Broken Inbound Links

If your site has been around for a while with no one paying too much attention to SEO…

…you’re going to find broken links.

If the destination of a link returns an error code, that’s a broken link.

From a technical SEO standpoint, it’s a good idea to fix these URLs. But it’s urgent to do this if other websites are linking to those broken URLs.

You can use ahref’s broken backlinks report to find these:

A URL might be broken for several reasons:

Your options can be:

Do whatever you need to do to avoid having broken backlinks.

Here are some resources to help you fix broken backlinks:

Guest Post on Relevant Sites

Back in 2014, Google cracked down on spammy guest posting as a link building practice.

Does this mean guest blogging doesn’t work anymore?

No.

If you write valuable guest posts on relevant websites and add links to your site in a natural (not spammy) way, guest blogging can be a great way to build links.

For example, here’s a post we published a while ago on the Moz blog:

It included a link to this site in the body.

It’s a helpful post, published on a relevant site in my industry, with a non-spammy link to my site. An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to search Google using advanced search operators.

Try these searches for your target keyword:

Reach out to the blogs or websites that make sense, it may be a good idea to have a few post pitches prepared beforehand.

ProTip: if you have already guest posted on other sites, send over examples along with your pitch to build some credibility.

Here are some resources to help you build links through guest blogging:

Use Broken Link Building

When other websites don’t fix their broken inbound links (and this happens a lot for larger websites) that’s an opportunity for you.

There are several approaches to finding these broken links:

Approach #1: Use a Chrome extension

You can use a Chrome extension like Check My Links to try to find broken links in pages.

Approach #2: Find broken inbound links to your competitors

Grab your biggest competitors and use ahrefs to find all their broken inbound links.

Approach #3: Find broken outbound links on authoritative sites in your niche

If there’s an authoritative website in your niche you want to get links from, you can scrape their site to find broken outbound links.

ahrefs is also a great tool for this, but you can also use something free like Screaming Frog.

Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to provide websites with an alternative to link to.

You can use Wayback Machine to find what the content of a broken URL was before it was taken down or removed.

Understand what the content was, create something better or more up-to-date, and reach out to people linking to it letting them know they have a broken link (and you have something they can easily substitute it with).

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is everything you do to make it easier for search engines to find and crawl your website. Technical issues can prevent your site from ranking and getting organic traffic.

Fix Crawl Errors

Crawl errors are those preventing Google from viewing your content correctly.

You can find them using the Coverage report in Google Search Console.

Here are great resources on fixing crawl errors:

Use to HTTPS

In an effort to make the web “safer” for users, Google has made a push for more websites to use HTTPS.

So you might see a small ranking boost by switching from HTTP to HTTPS.

Fortunately, Squarespace provides a free SSL certificate for your website once you’ve added your domain.

There’s no need for you to take any action here, but we mention it just because people have asked about it.

Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly

As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches.

Plus, Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile (not the desktop) version of your site to crawl and index it.

They are basically saying: “If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank highly on Google”.

A responsive theme is one that adapts to any screen size.

All Squarespace sites are built to be responsive, but you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check your Squarespace site:

Fix Broken Links

Broken links on your site send a bad signal to Google.

A site with a lot of broken backlinks is probably not up-to-date and unlikely to provide a valuable answer to searchers.

You should try to avoid having broken links on your site.

To find broken links, you can use Screaming Frog or ahrefs.

Once you’ve identified your broken links, you can fix the issue by redirecting, updating, or removing the link.

Speed Up Your Squarespace Site

Search engines value sites that provide a good user experience and the speed of your site is a huge factor.

A slow-loading site will increase your bounce rate, as visitors lose patience and leave.

Many tools offer speed tests along with suggestions on how to make your site faster—some of the ones we like are Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, Pingdom.

ProTip: It’s super easy to get caught up in trying to fix all of these speed issues and getting a perfect score. DON’T do this—in general, these are things you can do to improve the speed of your Squarespace site:

Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console

An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all the pages that you want to be indexed.

Squarespace automatically creates and updates your website’s sitemap for you—you can find it at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Then, you can use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap to Google:

Tracking & Monitoring

These are some extra tips you might want to check out now that you’ve gone through the rest of the items on this Squarespace SEO checklist.

Set Up Rank Tracking

Whenever I start working on an SEO project, one of the first things I do is set up rank tracking.

Doing this will allow you to easily monitor your website’s rankings among dozens or hundreds of keywords.

Tracking your rankings lets you know whether your efforts are paying off.

These are the tools I like for rank tracking:

Claim Your Brand Name on as Many Social Networks as Possible

For reputation management reasons, not only do you want to make sure no one else gets your account name, but you can often own all the results on the first page of a search for your brand if you’re a new website or company.

You can use NameChk to help with that.

Set Up Alerts

This was already covered in the link building section, but we recommend setting up Google Alerts or ahrefs alerts for mentions of your brand and products.

This way, you can be the first to know when someone’s talking about your company or brand and respond accordingly.

In Conclusion

This should be everything you need to get going optimizing your Squarespace website for search engines.

If you’re looking for even more digital marketing resources, try a few of these:

Boost the Impact of Your SEO Efforts With Other Marketing Channels

SEO works best when combined with other channels.

If you’re just getting started on digital marketing or want to learn more about how to get more traffic and sales from other marketing channels, check out our free strategy guides:

Some other SEO Checklists that you can check out are:

You can also check out the Clickminded SEO SOP toolkit to get step-by-step instructions for your SEO campaigns.

90+ SOPs, Templates, AI Prompts, And Video Tutorials To Supercharge Your Business

The Marketing Starter Kit is your blueprint to scale your digital marketing operations. Enter your email to claim it free:

Unleash the Power of SEO and 10x Your Traffic from Google

Get the SEO Checklist sent to your inbox, for FREE!

A Six-Figure Side Project: The ClickMinded Story

Hey! There is an update to this story, which you can find in a more recent blog post, here.

ClickMinded is an SEO training course. It’s a side project that took off and ended up replacing my full-time job at Airbnb. This is the ClickMinded story.

If you’re too lazy to read, just watch the video above 🙂

So, the blog post below was originally written in December 2014.

It later became the premise for the video above, a talk I gave at SumoCon, a conference put on by Noah Kagan’s Sumo.com in September 2016, in Austin, Texas.

There have been quite a few updates to the story since then, but this video gives a pretty nice overview of where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

ClickMinded started as an SEO training course, and is now just one of a bunch of digital marketing courses.

Here’s the original post in its entirety, slightly refreshed and updated for the modern era:

******************************

ClickMinded is the SEO training course I’ve been working on for the last 5 years. It’s been a side project for most of that time, up until two months ago when I quit my job to work on it full-time.

A few years ago, it crossed over the six-figure revenue mark and started bringing in more than my annual salary, managing SEO at Airbnb.

It has grown even more since, and has produced tons of happy customers. 

I’ve gotten lots of questions about how all this happened. The short answer is that it was messy.

Here’s how it went.

Who is this guy?

I lived in San Francisco for 6 years before recently leaving. I moved to the bay area in 2011 to manage SEO at PayPal. Two years later, I left to work on SEO at Airbnb.

If it’s not obvious yet, I love SEO. More specifically, I really enjoy the puzzle that SEO is. Trying to make a particular document the most relevant on the web for a specific query, relative to competitors, is a fascinating process. It’s a lot of fun for me.

I’ve had a number of side projects throughout college and into my 20’s. ClickMinded definitely isn’t the first attempt, but it’s certainly the one I’ve put the most heart and energy into.

My Dreamhost account is a graveyard of domain names that are the byproduct of 1-day idea seizures.

I’m sure this personality type isn’t alien to entrepreneurial-minded people. What I want to point out is that I wasn’t really able to succeed until I stopped having lots of ideas all the time and started to focus on just one.

With that said, I wouldn’t have ever stumbled upon ClickMinded if I wasn’t constantly moving from one idea to the next. So there’s a balance there, I guess. I think the key is to aggressively think through different problems, and when you’ve found something that you’re more passionate about than anything else, drop everything and push on it as hard as you can.

The early days of ClickMinded

Towards the end of 2011, I had asked if I could lead one of the monthly marketing classes that were open for anyone to teach at PayPal. The entire marketing org was obligated, once a month, to “refine their marketing skills” and learn about a subject they generally knew nothing about. I put together a 2-hour “Introduction to SEO” course with a colleague of mine, and it went really well.

I got really good feedback on it. Specifically, I was told multiple times I made a previously uninteresting topic, interesting. The good reviews were a catalyst for me to ask my boss if it was cool if I started teaching SEO classes on the weekends to startups in San Francisco. He said it was okay, but asked me to check in with the eBay legal team first, to see if there was a conflict of interest.

I was super nervous about checking in with them and put off writing the email for much longer than I should have. What if they say no? I would be destroyed and would kick myself for not just going for it without asking for buy-in. I wrote and re-wrote it multiple times. It took me about 5 days to write 3 paragraphs. I was really sweating this one. After sending it, I got an email back in about 10 minutes, one line, that said: “sounds like it’s not a problem”.

I bring this up because this seems to be one of the first big things that hold people back from starting side projects while they’re working full time. Most of the people I’ve met doing a side project outside of their work tend to immediately view themselves as traitorous. My bias is, you shouldn’t be all that worried about it. There are definitely real, actual conflicts of interest out there in the world. If what you’re working on isn’t, and it’s starting to get traction, then let the right people know and stop letting it hang over you. Many of the people I’ve met trying to get a side project going are far more secretive than they need to be about whatever it is they’re working on.

After getting the okay, my back-of-the-napkin plan was:

The first version of the site was pretty simple:

Initially, my plan for customer acquisition was, obviously, SEO. But as any practitioner of SEO knows, results can take time. So the chicken and egg problem while I waited for my search rankings to go up, was how to get users for an SEO class, without SEO?

To get started, I went old-school, the same way you’d start mowing lawns or babysitting. I started printing out flyers with pull tabs on them that had my website URL. I burned a vacation day at work and walked around the city all day, papering most of the FiDi, North Beach, the Marina, SOMA and the Mission with flyers.

Not a huge surprise, but this didn’t work at all.

Surprisingly, this was the moment where a bunch of my friends said they knew ClickMinded was going to succeed, regardless of the fact that it seemed like a stupid way to acquire new users. I was told that everyone has ideas, but not everyone has followed through.

A hidden gem: Meetup.com

Next, I set up a meetup group, The San Francisco SEO Meetup.

I didn’t exactly have a plan in starting this group, but it felt like something would happen if I gave it a shot. This ended up being absolutely crucial in getting the initial traction I needed for my class.

The formula for my meetup group success was:

This will effectively give you a mailing list that grows pretty quickly.

Minimum Viable Course

Once I had a substantial meetup group of people that were all interested in SEO and online marketing, I set up an event at a coworking space in San Francisco and did a deal with them to hold an event there.

I had three goals: force myself to finalize the class, get feedback on making it better and get five 5-star Yelp reviews.

I had no intention of charging attendees. With that said, the key to getting people to show up was not to ask them to come to a free event but to give them a free pass to an expensive event. I set up an Eventbrite, set a price of $100, and then emailed my meetup group saying “Hey, I’m holding this event, it’s an all-day Saturday course. It’s normally $100, but it’s free for the first 15 people that email me. Let me know”.

In the last 30 seconds of the course, I thanked everyone for coming and mentioned that I was looking for 2 things in return: feedback and Yelp reviews. Then I did one more email follow up after the event, asking again for the same thing.

In doing this, I accomplished all of my goals. I finished my course, I got tons of great feedback on it and I had four 5-star Yelp reviews. It was enough to give it a shot. Armed with a few good yelp reviews and a minimally viable class, I walked into Parisoma, another coworking space in San Francisco, and asked them if they ever hosted tech class meetups. They said it sounded interesting. We agreed on a rev share, and I had a date set for my first class.

A large portion of revenue derived from ClickMinded over the last 3 years was via some type of revenue share. Whenever I mention this to friends, I’ll often get a response like:

What I found through this process, is that the % of revenue shared is almost the last consideration for me now. Much more important is the platform and the expected number of users, especially when you’re new.

After agreeing with Parisoma to do a course at their facility, they added the event to their weekly email. Cass Phillipps from Web Wallflower, a bay area events mailing list, instantly picked it up and sent it out in her next email. All of a sudden, I had my first 3 customers.
Those first 3 paying customers were definitely the hardest.

Once that was done, I entered into a new rev-share arrangement with SpherePad. This was another key agreement because I realized early on that flexible rev-shares (where I could book a room up to a day beforehand) were much less risky than setting a date and paying upfront. If I didn’t find students, I was on the hook for it, and it was incredibly stressful to try to continually find new students right as I was starting. It made more sense for me to give a little more of the income away in exchange for not being on the hook for renting a room out for a day when no students signed up.

This continued for approximately 3 months. I held 9 classes, with class sizes ranging from 1 to 4, all at $500 per person.

Eventually, I was contacted via Twitter by Samir Housri, from Rho Ventures in New York.

Samir said that if I’m ever on the east coast and holding a class, I should let him know. Having never met someone at a VC firm, and being absolutely star-struck that he would ever reach out to me, I made up a reason to go to the east coast, contacted WeWork New York and held a training course there.

He came, along with a few other students that WeWork promoted the class to, including a guy from TED. Meeting Samir was awesome, and we’re still in touch.

The transition to online

One of the other results of the Meetup group was that a student from HULT, an international graduate school in San Francisco, came to a happy hour. He was part of a digital marketing club on campus and asked if I wanted to come to one of his classes and give a talk on SEO. I said sure.

Crucially, after finishing my presentation, a student raised her hand and said “Have you ever heard of Udemy? You should put your class on there.” This was the turning point in the life of ClickMinded.

At the end of the talk, I asked if anyone would be interested in doing an internship, and a number of hands shot up. I later emailed all the students with a long summary of what I was looking for in a summer internship and had a bunch of people apply.

I ended up turning this internship into what would become the first version of ClickMinded – as an online class on Udemy. Huge props to Bruno and Lorena, my first two interns who helped film the course and get it live. This was a giant project, and I’m still deeply grateful for all the work they did on this. ClickMinded went live on Udemy, and everything changed.

Here’s the first teaser:

Getting the ball rolling

Even though the course was done, it certainly wasn’t ready to be sold. In order to get it ready for users to want to buy it, I made two assumptions around social proof:

In order to do this, I used the Meetup group as leverage again. Here’s how I did it:

Outside of this, I also did the standard act of spamming a few close friends and asking them for reviews on Udemy.

I got to 100 users and 10 5-star reviews in about 5 days.

I will admit, many of my first 10 reviews were artificial. Is this justified by the fact that the next 50 reviews were real 5-star reviews? Probably not. Does it make me feel better? A little. The reality is, I found it very difficult to close the checkout loop when it’s clear that very few people have purchased the product, and there aren’t any reviews.

Since those first 100 quasi-artificial users and 10 quasi-artificial good reviews, the class now has thousands of enrolled companies with hundreds of 5-star reviews.

Self-Hosting

Once the transition to Udemy was made, I also started hosting content on my own site. This was a great experience, and I learned a whole bunch going through this process. Lots of it was very messy at times. Video encoding, S3, multiple payment processors, dealing with hundreds and thousands of user login credentials. There was a lot here. I went through a number of different learning management systems throughout this:

The course is now hosted on Teachable, which is far and away the most valuable learning management system platform I’ve ever used. I’m a huge fan, and I highly recommend reaching out to them if you’re hosting a class of your own.

Based on these different platforms, the site also had to evolve a number of times as well:

The kingmaker: AppSumo

The biggest break for me was landing my first deal with AppSumo back in 2012. I wrote a blog post on this called $21,243 in 8 days: Why AppSumo is crushing it. This summarizes the AppSumo story. I’ve done many more deals with AppSumo, and each one has been larger than the previous.

Roughly 35% of users have come from AppSumo. If you can get a deal going with these guys, you’re golden.

Grad school

A few months later, the class was rolling, and the dean of HULT San Francisco gave me a call and asked if I wanted to teach an elective. Since I had offered to do a few guest lectures, it put me on their radar. This was super interesting, because it was a graduate-level class, and I definitely didn’t go to grad school.

I went into his office one day after work, and we hashed out a bunch of ideas for a course. I ended up coming back to the school the next summer and taught a class, Customer Acquisition Through Digital Marketing. It was a summer elective taught to 105 MBA and MIM students over the course of 6 weeks. I’m teaching it again next summer.
I was also fortunate enough to teach a Stanford Continuing Studies course on search engine optimization. This was funny, mostly because Stanford still owns the patent on PageRank.

Online learning and the future

I used to think online classes were a complete scam. They used to have that “University of Phoenix” stigma in my mind. Maybe it was because I took a few in college and they were garbage.

Since starting ClickMinded, I’ve received dozens of emails from students describing some amazing outcomes. A huge number of people have said they’re getting more traffic and customers after finishing the class – which is validation that it’s working, and that’s great. But there’ve also been students that were hired for a new job, promoted from their old job, or changed their career entirely after taking the course. Getting emails like that has been awesome.

I’ve now been on both sides of the table. I’ve taught a class with thousands of users that have been positively impacted, and I’ve participated as a student in classes with thousands of users and was very positively impacted.

Online learning is for real.

Now I’m interested in working on a viable alternative to grad school.

Final Thoughts

I think my advice for starting a new side project can be summarized in two points:

There are a ton of great ideas out there. There are a ton of profitable ideas out there. There are not a ton of ideas that you will personally be passionate about. What I’ve come to discover, is that when getting started, the size of the market is much less important than the size of your own personal interest in the market.

If the passion’s there, you’ll find that you’ll WANT to go paper the city with flyers, even if it might not work. You’ll WANT to host happy hours and geek out about search engines. You’ll WANT to give lectures at universities that don’t seem to have a point or an end game. You’ll WANT to change learning platforms 3 or 4 or 5 times order, in order to better deliver your product.

Finding something you’re passionate about working on is the tough part. Once you do, you just gotta keep wiggling.

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What feature would be used to collect how many times users downloaded a product catalog?

Answer:

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Explanation:

Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to track as Events.

Learn more here:  https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068

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Which Goals are available in Google Analytics?

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Learn more here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012040

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In Multi-Channel Funnel reports, how are default conversions credited?

Answer:

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Explanation:

The Multi-Channel Funnels reports are generated from conversion paths, the sequences of interactions (i.e., clicks/referrals from channels) that led up to each conversion and transaction. In the reports, channels are credited according to the roles they play in conversions—how often they assisted and/or completed sales and conversions. Conversion path data include interactions with virtually all digital channels.

Learn more here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863

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Filters cannot perform what action on collected data?

Answer:

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Explanation:

View filters allow you to limit and modify the traffic data that is included in a view. For example, you can use filters to exclude traffic from particular IP addresses, focus on a specific subdomain or directory, or convert dynamic page URLs into readable text strings.

Learn more here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6086075

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When does the Analytics tracking code send a pageview hit to Google Analytics?

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Explanation:

A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

Learn more here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1257084

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