- Startup Spells 🪄
- Posts
- 🪄 Unsplash's Growth Strategy
🪄 Unsplash's Growth Strategy
PLUS: Discover the best online communities for Entrepreneurs
Hey,
The Spells Master is back!
Welcome to the 50th issue.
Today's topics:
Unsplash's Growth Strategy
A curated list of The Top Online Communities
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.
Over 150 million views on @unsplash
I know it's not a lot, but for me it's 🤯
unsplash.com/@nicknice— Nick Nice (@NickNice85)
8:05 AM • Dec 9, 2023
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.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/0d734139-db54-4774-84f7-0fa4dcf676f9/unsplash-backlink-strategy.png?t=1716727340)
Unsplash Backlink Strategy
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.
@mikaelcho @deadcoder0904 @lennysan@TimmyCarbone In 2017, we took a small team of 3 people and over ~6 months made a bunch of changes to our site to better optimize and point internal link equity to high value keywords. We then exploded in organic traffic. Us on left, Grubhub on the right (3/x)
— Luke Chesser (@lukechesser)
3:40 AM • Jan 12, 2021
Source is straight from the horse's mouth
Product as Marketing
Unsplash was originally a Tumblr blog sharing 10 new posts every 10 days.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/60f01327-586f-4357-ba7a-de55d5020d79/unsplash-tumblr-blog.jpg?t=1716727383)
Unsplash as a Tumblr Blog
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.
"When you create an app or website as marketing... people keep coming back even though you're not putting in extra work"
So they followed the same strategy and launched more products:
Launch This Year (now dead) - Weekly Lessons on how to build a business, handpicked by web industry professionals
How Much To Make An App - Find out how much your app will cost in under a minute!
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
Zuckerberg owns your IG account
China owns your TikTok account
Elon owns your Twitter account
But you own your email list
So spend more time
... growing & monetizing your email list this week to be protected when they decide to shut you down or pull you off for no reason
— Marketing Max (@MarketingMax)
7:00 PM • May 9, 2024
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
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.
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.
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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