Five marketing stories that will blow your mind

Five marketing stories that will blow your mind

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Five cool af marketing things.

If you need some marketing inspo on this beautiful day, this one’s for you.

Ranking for 200,000+ keywords with a less-than-one-year-old site

This Chrome Extension uses GPT to summarize YouTube videos.

Every time a user summarizes a video, a page gets created on their site with the AI-generated summary.

The company also uses GPT to:

  • Write the page title, meta description, and subtitle.
  • Classify and organize each summary so that they’re all linked to from the footer with just a few clicks.
  • Recommend related summaries to keep people on the site.

They weren’t ranking for anything for their first few months (launched December 2022). Then in late spring last year, they did a press push getting some good backlinks.

These backlinks propelled them to ranking for over 200,000 keywords with these AI-generated pages all within less than a year of first launching.

Eightify's SEO rankings started only in September

Then, early this year, there was a Google AI penalization scare. Webmasters were getting all their properties penalized by Google even if only one used AI-text.

So this site, in fear, removed all their AI pages and subsequently lost all their rankings.

Recently they relaunched their AI pages.

Now they’re ranking for 24,000 keywords – still within under 2 years of launching. Not bad.

My deep dive on this:

Clear copywriting

The viral Tony Delivers flyer.

This guy went super viral early this year.

He took something customers didn’t like – high delivery fees and apathetic delivery people – articulated it very clearly, then offered a solution so good people didn’t believe it was real.

  • Clear, no-nonsense articulation of the problem: (“Angry with absurd Uber Eats’ fees? Want your DoorDash delivery person to care about you and your food?”).
  • Clear, no-nonsense explanation of the great solution: (“I’ll deliver for $5”).

He’s been completely booked since and now he’s scaling with more delivery people and an app coming out for users in NYC, LA, and SF.

Tony Delivers' app waitlist notice - launching in NYC, LA, SF, and other major US cities.
Tony Delivers announces on Instagram that his app is coming soon.

I spoke to Tony on the phone. He told me how he made his flyer go viral. It’s a good story.

$80,000 MRR with this faceless TikTok strategy

This software company is ripping TikToks of attractive people and using these videos to make hundreds of thousands USD in MRR for their mobile apps.

This was shared by @iamgdsa on 𝕏 and then went viral.

It’s unethical and immoral, but this is what’s happening.

App developers are spending days finding relevant selfie-style TikToks of attractive people without many views.

They’re taking these videos, shortening them to 2.5-second clips, and using them as hooks for their own TikToks, even making it look as if the people in the videos are recommending their apps.

The videos are downloaded without the TikTok watermark, and used without permission of the creators.

Turns out this is super common. I’ve talked to a few developers now who are doing this because of the success of lots of other app developers.

One developer is doing this with a tanning mobile app and making $80,000 MRR with this strategy.

In fact, startups with well-known angel investors like Nikita Bier are even doing this.

Podcast on this below:

Caleb Simpson’s story

This is a good one because it’s not an overnight success.

But it is somebody who found tremendous success.

It’s the guy who goes around asking people how much they pay for rent and an apartment tour.

The short story is he spent years learning to make videos, finding mentors, and doing odd jobs to support himself.

Years.

NYC, where he lives, is an expensive place, and he would take whatever he could to pay rent and afford food.

After several years he had the idea for what his niche became. “Hey, how much do you pay for rent and could you give an apartment tour?”

Instead of making the videos himself, he tried to persuade an influencer friend into doing it.

The friend declined.

The principle here is make what you want to see.

But it wasn’t easy.

He had to stage the first video because nobody would give him a tour.

However, the idea was good and it took off immediately.

After this he was getting DM’d by people wanting to give tours of their apartments.

Even crazier, when he was really viral, he wanted to charge $120,000 for a single sponsored video. His manager said there’s no way he could do that.

He fired his manager because he believed he could.

He got somebody who was aligned with his vision and successfully got paid $120,000 for a sponsored video.

Make what you want to see and don’t give up.

Podcast on this below:

$10,000+ MRR with straightforward SEO on a simple app

Stagetimer.io's hero image for one of its bottom-of-funnel SEO landing pages.

There are lots of timer apps out there and this one – stagetimer.io – is making a name for itself with SEO.

It’s making SEO landing pages for its timer in different scenarios that people would be searching for:

  • Professional timer for event productions.
  • Online timer for education.
  • Free countdown timer for esports tournaments and matches.
  • Easy-to-use timer for fitness classes, interval training, and workouts.
  • Free countdown timer for webinars.
  • So many more – spends a day making each page. There’s not a lot of unique copy on each page.

This is known as bottom-of-funnel SEO and it’s so powerful I’ve been working on an entire program about it since April – called Compact Keywords. In fact, I just started shipping an early version of the product and somebody told me, “In video 3 and I’m like a 16 year old kid with a PS2!!! This is changing my whole concept of what I will do with the site man.”

Stagetimer is doing the Compact Keywords method. Making landing pages targeting problems people are searching. Stagetimer is the solution to these problems.

Their MRR was shared as over $10,000 back in July. As their rankings have only increased since then, I’d bet their MRR has as well.

Covered in depth in the Compact Keywords program.

Thanks for reading.

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Edward Sturm

Edward Sturm is an entrepreneur, SEO, writer, and digital video and image producer.

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