TrustMRR Marketing: Get SEO Backlinks by Sharing Revenue

TrustMRR marketing works by letting you share verified revenue data to earn valuable backlinks.

The platform targets solopreneurs and indie hackers, making it perfect for products serving that audience.

How TrustMRR Marketing Works

The concept is simple. Share your Stripe-verified revenue. Get ranked on their leaderboard. Earn backlinks and traffic.

Several founders have already tested this strategy with solid results. Obviously, its stupid to share revenue if your product is easy to clone and market but for some, it works.

For example, FounderStack bought an ad slot and broke even on conversions. SaaS Group, which acquires SaaS companies, bought an ad slot too.

Gumroad's Top Position Strategy

Even Gumroad shares their revenue despite significant decline. They rank #1 on TrustMRR with $878,595,861 in total revenue.

Gumroad's revenue has dropped from $14M peaks to around $7M monthly, but they maintain their top leaderboard position

The revenue chart shows the decline clearly. Monthly revenue peaked above $14M, then fell to $7M range. Recent months hover around $7.1M.

But Gumroad stays visible. That's the point.

Brand Awareness Through Top Rankings

Zipf's Law explains why top positions win. Winners take disproportionate results.

Seth Godin wrote in The Dip: "Vanilla is far and away the top ice cream flavor – 22% of all sales, (Chocolate is 8%) "

First position wins bigger than everyone else combined.

Gumroad proves this. Despite tanking revenue, they get maximum eyeballs. Every visitor browsing TrustMRR sees their logo, company name, and numbers.

This passive brand awareness works 24/7. No active marketing spend. Just revenue sharing creates constant visibility with indie hackers and solopreneurs.

Founders considering alternatives see Gumroad. Past users remember it exists. New users discover it organically.

The leaderboard becomes an always-on billboard for your target audience.

Dofollow Backlinks Pass SEO Value

TrustMRR provides dofollow backlinks to every listed startup. This matters for SEO.

Marc Lou, who built TrustMRR, tweeted: "Go get your backlink until I change my mind because people add nsfw websites (which is bad for SEO"

Side-note: One of my posts included the word f#ck in its title and when I searched for title on Google, Google hid that specific word. It probably is bad for SEO as an SFW site.

Marc Lou encourages getting backlinks while TrustMRR maintains dofollow links. The site has a Domain Rating of 33 with 49 backlinks

Link juice flows from high-authority sites to linked sites. TrustMRR's DR33 passes authority to your domain.

Startups with lower domain authority benefit most. The link juice transfer boosts SEO rankings. Google sees the connection. Your site gains credibility.

One quality dofollow backlink from a ranking site beats dozens of nofollow links. TrustMRR delivers that automatically when you share revenue.

Ilias ISM uses similar quality standards for his directory. He requires $100+ revenue in the last 30 days for submissions. He filters for sites with 30+ domain rating or 1000+ traffic. This quality bar improves submitted sites significantly.

TrustMRR doesn't follow the same principle yet so you might get a boost simply by connecting it to your Stripe.

Traffic Data Tells the Real Story

According to DataFast analytics, TrustMRR pulled 84,800 visitors month-to-date. Revenue hit $12,500 with a 60% bounce rate and 2 minute average session time.

The traffic comes from:

• Direct: 58,100 visitors

• Organic search: significant portion

• Organic social: growing channel

• Referrals: steady stream

Top pages getting traffic include /game with 17,700 visitors and various startup profile pages.

Geographic breakdown shows strong presence in United States (16,700 visitors), France (9,100), India (5,400), and Spain (5,300).

TrustMRR's Clever Ad Strategy

TrustMRR runs 2 ad slots on both left and right sidebars. They flip the positions around. Total of 20 ads rotating through the site.

The ads display cleanly alongside the leaderboard with sponsors like SaaS Group, Requesty, Newsletters.ai, Inbound, and GojiberryAI visible in rotation.

Each ad slot sells for $1,499 per month. With 20 rotating positions, that's serious ad revenue on top of the traffic value.

Smart move for maximizing revenue while keeping the user experience clean.

TrustMRR marketing makes sense if your audience is makers, freelancers, employees, and Indie Hackers. You need Stripe-verified revenue and a product that serves solopreneurs or Indie Hackers.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Joint Ventures print.

YouTubers do this too.

2/

Female = Profit

The other day I was checking Instagram on my alt account and I noticed something profound. It was more female videos than males (mind you I rarely follow anyone and don't interact on Insta as much and I know how social media algo actually works) but still the gap between female and male was so significant that you can easily see the difference. In 10+ posts, I think 8 or 9 were female.

I bet Julia's UGC content agency has 70%-30% female to male ratio or even higher than that (and I checked to see if I was right). So the lesson is if you are a male on social media, chances are you have to try harder and I know its opposite in corporate world or everywhere else. Still, its a dumb game to play as most social media users are males. But if you are a female, you should post more of your pics to get easy engagement. Use any or all advantages.

With AI UGC, it might be easy to transform yourself into a female while recording as a male. This year we will see more of this as the tech is already here.

3/

To understand this, you need to understand 5 stages of Market Awareness and TOF/MOF/BOF.

• TOF: Makes people aware they have a problem (or entertains them)

• MOF: Makes people aware YOUR solution exists and is credible

• BOF: Makes people convert on YOUR solution specifically

Basically, viral organic content should hit TOF broadly. The "targeting" happens in MOF/BOF through retargeting those viewers with conversion-focused ads.

Life Reset's (Desmond's app) paid ads worked from day one because Desmond spent years building engaged audiences organically - Instagram knew who cared about habit tracking before he spent a dollar. Without a pixel he left money on the table (no purchase optimization like app installs + subscriptions), but the warm retargeting audiences from organic still outperformed cold traffic 3-5x.

Rabbit Holes

1. The Startup Automating 1,000+ Ads a Week

2. Dialing in an AI product's ICP and growing it to $400k ARR

3. Playkit's October Recap: 38M Views, 8k videos

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