🪄 Unsplash's Growth Strategy

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 50th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Unsplash's Growth Strategy

2. A curated list of The Top Online Communities

3. One recommended video on Getting a Personality

Unsplash's Growth Strategy

UGC at Scale

Unsplash gave away high-quality photos for free.

This gave them a lot of reach among writers and bloggers who wanted to use copyright-free images.

Everybody likes free stuff and if its high-quality, then everyone loves it.

This got Unsplash loads of traffic because they had HD images and gave all of it for free.

So if you joined Unsplash as a photographer and uploaded your own photos, you could get a lot of traffic as well.

And tweets like this with links to Unsplash sends a lot of good signal to Google.

Link Building Strategy

Unsplash has the best link-building strategy of any company in the world.

When you download a photo, you get asked to copy the alt below by giving a shoutout to the original photographer.

And most bloggers don't mind giving back credit where its due. This is huge for backlinks.

Every single photo from Unsplash now gets backlinks. Backlinks are the most important factor for Google.

The more the backlinks, the higher a site ranks.

This made them explode in <6 months.

Source is straight from the horse's mouth

Product as Marketing

Unsplash was originally a Tumblr blog sharing 10 new posts every 10 days.

It was a side-project created to market their freelance marketplace, Crew.

The Crew team had hired a photographer to shoot stock photos, and decided to share the best images that were leftover online.

They got #1 on Hacker News and got 50k visitors in the 1st hour.

So they followed the same strategy and launched more products:

1. Launch This Year (now dead) - Weekly Lessons on how to build a business, handpicked by web industry professionals

2. How Much To Make An App - Find out how much your app will cost in under a minute!

3. Moodboard - Share your inspirational images with a link. No account needed.

This allowed Unsplash to keep growing.

A curated list of The Top Online Communities

The Hive Index has the best online communities in one place.

It has 223 topics, 3893 communities, and 34 platforms listed on it.

Penetrate into these communities where your ideal customers are watching so you can market it to them on other platforms. This way they'll never know where you came from. Of course, market it with a sock account using a female profile.

One recommended video on Getting a Personality

This video covers how to get a personality in 5 minutes.

But it is a phenomenal video on how to learn really fast.

It only takes like 20-50 hours to learn basics of any field. People spend years getting their first 20 hours.

Once you have this frame shift, you'll realize how so many things that seem hard are actually just unknowns. We fear things we don't know.

Unless you're doing hard science or physics, you can learn anything in just 20 hours of preparation.

Tweet of the day

Social Media is becoming gated day-by-day. They disallow outside links.

Use social as top of funnel to build your own email list. There's no reason not to.

You can just send a 5-minute email weekly that takes 30-minutes to write to keep your audience entertained.

Even Kevin Hart knows the value of an email list as he kept one when he was an up and coming comedian.

Rabbit Holes

1. The History of Unsplash - Every company should have this page and make it the best page on their website. It is the autobiography page of a site.

2. How to use influencers to get GitHub stars - A terrific guide on how to start with Influencer Marketing. If the influencer's audience fits the product, you can make a ton of sales this way.

3. AI comes for YouTube's thumbnail industry - Thumbnails and Videos are the easiest and the most underrated ways to make your first $10k per month online. Midjourney, Krea AI, and Runway ML is all you need. Once you learn how to make extremely good thumbnails, you can position yourself as a Book Cover Specialist, Movie Poster Specialist, or Ad Specialist. Look around you, you'll see images everywhere.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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Read all the old case-studies here.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. YouTube Thumbnail Playbook: Make $10k/month in 15 mins/day using Midjourney AI (LINK)

2. Destroy competitors ranking with Blackhat SEO (LINK)

3. Looksmaxxing App (Exploiting Men's Beauty) (LINK)