How We Increased Traffic 30% And Grew Our Audience On Youtube
This is a follow up story for Visualmodo. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hello, I’m Claudio, co-founder of Visualmodo.com, we develop WordPress themes and plugins that make the site design process easier and faster.
Our main product is the Anzu WordPress theme and the Borderless WordPress plugin, both can be downloaded for free. In addition, using our community and the knowledge learned from the Visualmodo blog (which has 2k+ posts) we have started a free Guest Posting outreach service to connect site owners and bloggers with marketers under Growwwth for free.
In numbers, since our last interview, we increased revenue for our products by 15%, and the recurrency (year purchased) raised 60%. The company continues to grow, and we’re always creating new features and services.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
With so much in the world in the past year, we faced many challenges, but our content creation team was able to maintain organic growth:
- Traffic increased 30%: Our content creation keeps focused on web development and WordPress, but we are also talking about Crypto, marketing (SEO), and other Softwares now, which have contributed to the traffic.
- Profit increased 15% since our last interview: The subscription (payment one time per year) helped and the free products that teach more people also contributed.
- We gained 4,000+ Youtube followers: We are doing daily videos, focusing in reply to every single comment and starting at the shorts.
- We added 2 new valuable members to our team: A new great social media manager and talented web designer to build amazing pre-built websites that our WPanzu theme users can import with a single click.
We have started a profile in TrustPilot, a review site.
We also redesigned our site to focus more on the free products that have their pro licenses as well as the optional up-sells, like a bundle.
We’re also noticing a lot of challenges related to API (connections between different products and services) like Google Fonts for example, it’s almost like the tech market is building some walls instead of bridges.
Unfortunately, a couple of friends got fired, and competitors closed their companies during financial difficulties. To share some numbers, this week, we received 5 v-cards and 2 offers to purchase similar business operations (WordPress themes portfolio).
Opportunities are appearing but the tech market isn’t all green as it has been in recent years.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
One of the biggest problems we found was the WordPress and PHP recent changes, which made us re-develop the widgets, blocks, and other engines of our WordPress products.
Another hard week was when individuals attempted to launch a DDoS attack on our site and hack us from every angle, slowing down our servers and requiring us to invest a lot of time in developing robust security practices to keep our data and that of our customers safe. With the help of CloudFlare, Kubernetes, and a lot of hard work, we were able to solve the problem and the hackers eventually gave up.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
You must focus, not only on your job but on a single project, you must work until it goes right, not only to see if it goes right.
In the last year, to focus on Visualmodo, we had to stop with the CyberCulture site, Expo site, and GetPixels site, which were side projects that consume our time and budget so we can focus on the Visualmodo transformation.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
This year, we plan to assist every single WordPress user by having our Borderless plugin active on up to one million sites, in addition to our Anzu WP theme. To achieve this, we are developing an Amazon system that allows users to import their website with just one click, providing them with pre-built websites for every business niche and style, similar to starting with a ready-made page at no cost. We are also working on numerous collabs with popular blogs and YouTube channels to market it.
In the next five years, we aim to launch a Cloud hosting and comprehensive site management service, along with marketing services to help grow our users' businesses.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I read a lot of guides and tutorials, but for books: The Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman was great and very interesting. In addition to the Noise - a Flaw in Human Judgment from the same author.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Be aware of the trends. Check your competitors from time to time and try to create a link with people in your market niche. Try co-labs, competitors, and cross-promotions, growing alone is hard, but growing together is fast and safer. A lot of times, a competitor can become a client or a real friend. Share knowledge and create a group to talk with people with the same business problems as you have your business.
Take some time out of your day to create an Instagram profile, where you only follow the persons that inspire you, use this feed to see what they are doing, selling, talking, and working on.
As a final (unusual tip) try to build a sense of community in your customer base, it can be a group, forum, Telegram group, or even a comments section in a YouTube video. Treat every single one as a friend, deeply answer every question and your NPS will increase. We are doing this on the YouTube comments section and on a Telegram group where we share a link to a couple of clients who open support tickets on our site.
The idea is to put together a group of people with the same purpose. And when you help one, you’ll help the group.
In addition, the whole idea of the growwwth.net project is to have the community share their sites.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We added 4 members to our team in the last year. But are always looking for new members, a technical writer, a traffic manager, and a mobile app developer are on the list and we’re looking for them. But hiring is quite complicated now because of the number of professionals fired from startups looking for a re-addition.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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