What's New: Generate organic traffic with custom GPTs

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Creating custom GPTs can be an easy way to drive organic traffic:

• Use the GPTs to capture people's attention by linking to your product, and adding a snippet at the end of the conversation.
• You're not stuck with the brain you were born with. Teaching something is one of the best ways to train and sharpen your mind.
• $104K in revenue in 3 months. Harsha Abegunasekara set up keyword alerts and spent 2 hours a day replying. This brought in his first students.

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Generate Organic Traffic With Custom GPTs 🤖

by Cem Ozcelik

Following OpenAI's announcement of the custom GPT feature, we realized it could be a viable channel to drive traffic to our newly launched AI advertising tool, Adsby. Here's how we did it!

Execution

In just two days, we prepared GPTs designed to address people's daily marketing challenges. Our aim was to connect with individuals who could benefit from Adsby's offerings. To streamline this initiative, we grouped these GPTs under the banner of Marketing GPTs.

While our focus was on rapid development, we spared no effort in customizing each GPT to excel in its specific domain, ensuring that the results would be genuinely beneficial for users.

After creating Marketing GPTs, we launched on Product Hunt. There, we hit third most popular product of the day! This drove traffic to the GPTs, and consequently, to Adsby.

Secret sauce

The real question was: How can we capture the attention of people using the GPTs?

Each GPT linked to Adsby on top. This was nice, but not sufficient for us.

So, we added a snippet at the end of the conversation, after the user received the result they wanted from each GPT. We didn't add overly pushy features that would disrupt the user's GPT experience. In other words, users could really use each GPT for their intended purposes, without any disruption to their main flow.

Statistics

Naturally, the usage numbers for each GPT varied. This provided us with insights into which tasks users search for the most on a daily basis. Here's our numbers:

• Ad Copy Generator: 1K+.
• Hashtag Generator: 1K+.
• Keyword Generator: 400+.
• Caption Generator: 200+.
• E-commerce Store Keyword Generator: 100+.
• Email Copy Generator: 70+.
• Synonym Keyword Generator: 30+.

Results

So, what was the impact on our organic traffic? Since the launch of Adsby on February 20, GPTs have ranked seventh among our sources of organic traffic.

Looking at the usage numbers of the GPTs, they brought organic users to the site, with a conversion of just over 6%.

While the traffic here wasn't very high, what surprised us was that, among the sources of organic traffic to Adsby, GPTs were the top three in terms of conversion rate. Our metric for conversion was the initiation of a free trial.

In conclusion, these GPTs, which did not take a significant amount of our time to produce, have provided us with traffic, users, and insights!

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In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🏛 The US TikTok ban may become law this week.

💲 Free trial: A startup advisor in your pocket. #ad

🔎 Seven ways to elevate your responsive search ads.

💞 Tinder now has a "Share My Date" feature for your curious friends.

📱 The future of AI gadgets is just phones.

🍔 Could plant-based meat really save the planet?

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Unlock Your Natural Creativity 🧠

by Zaur Tarunov

You’re not stuck with the brain you were born with. You can train your brain to think differently.

Tools of the trade

Think of your brain like a toolbox. Inside are different tools. They help you think, remember, and pay attention. Your brain has billions of tiny parts called neurons; they talk to each other using electricity and chemicals. This makes patterns called brain waves. Different patterns mean your brain is in different states, like being focused or relaxed.

The brain can rewire itself based on new experiences. Like a muscle, the more you exercise certain parts of your brain, the stronger those neural connections become. As a result, you’ll sharpen your memory and logical thinking.

Unlock your natural creativity

Think of something you’ve always wanted to try. If it’s learning new skills, be precise about what you aim to achieve.

Expand your professional network. Meeting people from different backgrounds and experiences can expose you to new ideas, perspectives, and knowledge. This cognitive stimulation can help keep your brain active and engaged.

Change your environment. Travel is a good way to do this, since you’re forced to navigate unfamiliar customs, languages, and ways of life. This mental exercise strengthens your brain’s ability to adapt, and think creatively.

Teach someone

Teaching is essential for learning. It forces you to review and reassess your knowledge, keep your mind active, and confront new ideas and approaches.

Everyone has something they know more about than others. Think about what other people ask you for advice on.

One of the fastest ways to start teaching is to start writing online. Just pick up the topic you’re the most excited about, learn the hell out of it, and write about it in your own words.

Create your memory palace

Choose a familiar location or route as your “memory palace.” This could be your home, a frequently walked path, or a well-known building.

Identify specific locations within your memory palace. These serve as the storage points for the information you want to remember. For example, in your home, it could be your front door, couch, etc.

Now, associate each piece of information with vivid, bizarre, or exaggerated mental images. The more visually striking and memorable the image, the better. Let’s say you need to remember a grocery list: Eggs, milk, bread, apples, and cheese. In the living room, picture a gigantic egg cracked open right in the middle of the floor. A weird and silly image like that will stick in your mind. Go to the kitchen, and see a huge puddle of milk all over the counter and floor. And so on.

To recall the list later, just mentally revisit each room of your home in order.

With practice, you can create multiple memory palaces for different topics or categories of information. It may seem strange at first, but giving your brain memorable visual hooks is a powerful trick for remembering almost anything.

Check out the full article here!

Discuss this story.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips!

Tighten your large font:

Reducing the spacing between characters in your large intro copy can really improve your landing page design.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

Dedicating Time to Reply Paid Off 💰

by Harsha Abegunasekara

Here’s how I successfully grew Metana, a Web3 bootcamp, to $104K in revenue in just under three months!

The formula

I launched Metana back in 2022. I grew it quickly by:

1. Setting up alerts: We used tools like F6bot and Notifier.so to get alerts on industry-related and competitor keywords, like "Learn Web3" or "Learn Blockchain."

2. Replying daily: Every day, I responded to over 100 Reddit threads, Facebook posts, and X threads related to our industry. For instance, if someone asked about a good Web3 bootcamp, I'd recommend Metana, using a friendly tone.

3. Overcoming challenges: Reddit was tough. The mods kept banning my accounts. So, I shifted to X, Facebook, and Quora, using the same strategy.

This helped us land our first students, hitting $100K in revenue within three months.

A note on Reddit

Selling is not okay on Reddit. Subreddits will ban you for this. If your comment doesn't flow naturally, Reddit bans your account.

I must admit that I was a bit wild on Reddit when I was first starting. I didn't really have a strategy. But now, I genuinely try to be as helpful as possible when I comment. Also, I openly identify as the founder when I'm offering help. This is working well for us now.

We are also benefitting from the comments we left on Reddit when we first started out, as they're now ranking on Google. That's giving us a major push.

Pro tip: Use different Chrome profiles for each account.

Wrapping up

• Set up Syften, and send mentions to Google Sheets or Airtable using Zapier or their RSS feed.

• Dedicate two hours daily to responding to these mentions. Use separate accounts, and don't mix them up!

Discuss this story.

The Tweetmaster's Pick 🐦

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Cem Ozcelik, Darko, Zaur Tarunov, Rob Hope, and Harsha Abegunasekara for contributing posts. —Channing