💡 How I came up with an idea for a software product and got my first sale 💰 within a week of launching it. Principles can be applied to most online businesses. Thread 👇
About 2 years ago, I browsed Stackoverflow for questions that people were asking about WooCommerce. The intention was to look out for ideas for products.
There were obviously tons of questions and answers. I narrowed down the list to about 20-30 very niched topics that had potential for products to be built around.
I spent a month writing posts about each topic in the form of guides and snippets on https://t.co/BVT4ORdAal. I paid attention to basic SEO practices when writing the content, adding images etc.
Within a week or two, I started ranking for a few of the long tail keywords and traffic started trickling in.
The site at the time was badly designed, but I mostly just wanted to gauge interest in each topic and see if there was a potential market for a product.
Life got in the way and I left https://t.co/BVT4ORdAal unattended for a while. But last month, I checked the stats and saw that a specific post was getting a good amount of traffic. Actually all the posts were getting traffic, but I focused on the one that was getting the most
Specifically it was a post with a code snippet that replaced the price of a WooCommerce product with the word FREE when it was set to $0.
I spent 2 evenings last month, building out a small but functional WordPress plugin product around this use case, plus some additional functionality to cover other use cases. See: https://t.co/u9pZ0fTYda
I added a note to the original post I had made with the code snippet to let people who arrived on the page from the search engines know that if they want an easier solution than implementing the code on the page, they can take a look at my plugin.
Within a week of adding that note, I made a sale. A week after that, I made another sale.
I have 20+ more of those posts that are currently getting search engine traffic that I am going to build out products for in the coming months. Small but functional products.
I'm also only getting started with Content Marketing. I have a ton more ideas on how to promote these products with free traffic. Looking forward to sharing with you in the coming weeks.