Three marketing examples of why you shouldn’t quit when things get hard.
You could be a minor tweak, pivot, or epiphany away from going in a direction that dramatically increases growth, ease, or conversions.
Jump Ahead
Going from position 50+ on Google to #1 with a 10-minute change
- I had a page perfectly targeting an easy keyword.
- For years, the page wasn’t ranking.
- I saw a suggestion on Reddit – republish the page under a slightly different URL.
- I changed the URL by a few characters then republished it and redirected the old URL to the new URL.
- MAGIC – I’m suddenly ranking #1.
The content on the page wasn’t the problem.
I didn’t have a lot of topical authority for what the content was about when I first published the page – so it didn’t rank.
Over the years I built up topical authority, but Google had stopped evaluating the content as it had been years since it was first published.
By republishing the page under a different URL, the content was reassessed with the new topical authority I had gained.
The keyword wasn’t competitive, so I ranked #1 right away.
Full written breakdown on this here.
351 views to 2.4 million views with a few edits to the same year-old video
This video (https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3VsBKStIO7/), when it was first posted, got 351 views.
A year later I took that already-edited video and edited it a bit more with fresh eyes:
- Cut the long introduction because my hook was buried.
- Removed words that could confuse people.
- Added captions.
- Added trending music.
I want to stress – the underlying content didn’t change. I only further edited a video that I already edited and published a year before.
But I was able to analyze it with fresh eyes.
The result of my edits (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGDGdpoiXBK/):
2.4 million views, 1,400 new followers.
Full write up on this one here.
I almost gave up in my first eight months
With my audiences across Instagram and TikTok and my daily SEO podcast, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that I’m now one of the bigger voices in SEO and digital marketing.
But in my first eight months of posting, I almost quit.
I started making daily social media videos November 1, 2022. I still have not missed a day of posting since then.
But there was a four-month stretch where:
- I had no traction on Instagram.
- All my TikTok videos were suddenly flopping hard.
At the same time, a lot of my friends had started doing well.
Meanwhile I’m in this desert of no traction, day after day after day – for FOUR MONTHS.
And I’m not going to lie, it was hard.
But I believed if I kept at it, I’d eventually get some epiphany to make it work.
And I did.
These are the epiphanies I got immediately following those four months in the desert:
- I tried Descript and it changed everything. It became SO much easier to make good content. There’s a reason I rant about how awesome this editing tool is on half of these articles. Descript made it so, with one click, I could remove all gaps between words. It was also way easier to add graphics and correct transcripts than in TikTok’s native video editor (which I had previously been using). If you want to see how I now edit shorts with Descript, this is how.
- I changed my content to focus less on trending news and more on giving valuable lessons.
- This one was a miracle and it’s what caused my Instagram growth to take off at the same time…
- Since starting, I had an automation republishing my videos from TikTok to Instagram without the TikTok watermark.
- I didn’t realize Instagram was suppressing views on videos published with third-party tools (I’ve heard they no longer do this, but I haven’t tested).
- My TikTok to Instagram automation was down so I had to post manually to Instagram. When I did this, I unknowingly toggled on a setting that had what I can only describe as a glitch.
- Posting manually made videos do way better – finally videos that went viral on TikTok also went viral on Instagram.
- Posting with the glitch setting increased reach A LOT further – way more than it should have. It was crazy. This setting existed for a few months. Me and my friend Avni Barman were using it and it ALWAYS worked.
- When the setting stopped working, we at least learned how important it was to post manually and we’ve been doing that since.
- This is my exact workflow for posting across social media now.
When you’re in the desert of no traction, you don’t realize how close you are to reaching new levels. I was only three insights away from dramatically increased growth, but I had no idea.
By not giving up, I increased my surface area for “lucky things” and epiphanies to occur. And eventually they did.
The same thing occurred with my method of SEO
For years, I was doing SEO wrong – and I didn’t realize it.
I was targeting competitive informational keywords, with low-buying intent, using long blog posts that took forever to write. This was the status quo in SEO; it’s what everybody did (and most still do).
After many years, I came across a few sites doing things differently.
I copied them, refined the method, and came up with what I have now:
- Targeting non-competitive transactional keywords with high-buying intent.
- Using short conversion-based landing pages that are faster and easier to make.
And the results were immediate.
These pages rank faster and convert to insane degrees:
As that video shows, nearly 7/10 searchers arriving to these landing pages are clicking through to our app – which they can use immediately. And we monetize with freemium (pay to get more features).
This method works for everything: ecom, SaaS, local…
Here’s Kris Ott with a pressure washing business in Spokane, Washington, sharing how his phone is now ringing several times a day with the method (and how his previous SEO agencies got him zero results):
If you haven’t tried Compact Keywords yet, you’re going to love it.
Get the method for your business at: https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/
And don’t quit!
