Where did these 1,000,000 page views come from? The mystery behind Uneed.best's web traffic with Thomas Sanlis (@T_Zahil)

Welcome to the 44 new subscribers who have joined since the last issue 🙌

If you don’t remember signing up, you probably signed up after seeing this tweet I wrote a few weeks that went viral.

Speaking of which, the success of that tweet has me thinking, should I pivot the focus/format/name of this newsletter?

For instance, maybe it’s “Maker Strategies” and I instead go deeper on one strategy of each maker.

Or I could niche down on just SEO strategies (leaning into the success of the viral post).

Hit reply to this email and let me know your thoughts.

On another note, I got a notification from Substack today that it’s been 3 months since the last issue. Whoops. That’s way too long–my apologies–but in my defense, this week’s maker had me STUMPED. I wanted to get to the bottom of what part of his strategy was driving his growth. I think I finally got it, but you let me know what you think.

Maker of Habit #35

Thomas Sanlis (@T_Zahil)

Why he’s featured

• Thomas has been posting some crazy traffic numbers for his product recommendation site, Uneed, which recently crossed over a million page views and basically I just really needed to find out how he was doing it

• (You can check out his analytics yourself on his public dashboard)

• He also has recently started monetizing the site and has already made over $5k in revenue.

• And he’s been in the indiemaking game for over 3 years and we love to see that kind of perseverance 💪

The mystery behind Thomas’ website traffic

As I mentioned, I really wanted to figure out how Thomas was driving all of this traffic to this site.

It seemed every week he was tweeting screenshots that looks like this:

That’s 3,000+ unique website visitors in a single day. That’s about how much traffic my product, Harold, gets in 8 months. 😂

But when I went searching on ahrefs (since most of the traffic was coming from Google and search engines), the data I was getting back did not match the data from Thomas’s public dashboard.

Ahrefs was showing only 2k traffic per month, while Thomas’s dashboard showed about 8x that amount. (18k page views compared to 2k).

Well this is how I learned that Ahrefs organic traffic numbers are just estimations, and they can be way off. In their own documentation, they recommend comparing Google Search Console (GSC) traffic data to Ahrefs traffic data to determine by what ratio the estimations are off.

Still, even though Ahrefs data wasn’t complete, I thought I could still use it to find the general pattern of traffic, what pages were getting the most traffic and from what keywords.

But that didn’t reveal anything.

Most of the traffic was actually from branded search. People searching for “uneed” or “uneed.best”.

So I was stumped. And turns out, so whats Thomas. 😂

Solving the mystery.

So why are so many people searching for “uneed”, a website that is only 9 months old? 

Most of us build a landing page and no one comes.

So why are so many people searching for “uneed”, a website that is only 9 months old?

I have a couple ideas:

1. Returning Users - Thomas told me that ~20% of his website visitors are returning visitors. This tells me Thomas has nailed one of the most effective, and most under-appreciated, growth engine: retention. Retaining the users you’ve already acquired.

2. Compounding Viral Loop/Flywheel - Returning users is great, but where does that initial traffic come from? My hypothesis: after Thomas manually adds hundreds of tools to the site, they inevitably start to get some traffic. And thanks to the “?ref=uneed.best” parameter at the end of the URL, uneed.best ends up showing up in the analytics dashboard. This is what happened to me.They then search for uneed.best on google, find the site and click around. This creates a viral growth loop. Because every website visitors that comes in, leads to more website visitors.

3. Build in Public Growth Loop:

   1. Uneed gets traffic

   2. Thomas shares a screenshot of said traffic

   3. More people search for uneed.best to see what all the hype is about.

   4. Repeat steps a-c.

I think it’s the combination of things, rather than just one thing, that adds up to all of the traffic over time. What do you think? Am I missing something?

3 more strategies Thomas is using:

📃 Generating lots of high quality pages

Thomas has over 162 pages on his site. One for each tag (for example, uneed.best/tag/Money) and a dozen more blog posts where he leverages his existing data/content into packaged lists.

Regardless of what Ahrefs shows, this is a solid SEO strategy that will pay dividends.

🛳 Constantly shipping. And tweeting about it.

This build in public strategy is a tried and true growth mechanism for indies and bootstrappers.

1700 page views from Twitter in the past 30 days can likely be attributed to this consistency over time.

♻️ Repurposing content with automations

We all know we should be repurposing the content we’ve already written. But who has time for that? That’s why Thomas has set up automations that auto-post to Instagram and Facebook every time he adds a new tool. He says they aren’t generating a ton of traffic right now but I do think it will help in the long run.

3 Habits that changed Thomas’ trajectory (in his own words)

📓 Using a notebook

Almost three years ago, I developed my first habit: using a notebook to organize my days. I take a page each day and divide it into two sections: "todo" and "habits”. This method allows me to easily evaluate my productivity at the end of the day, which provides me with a sense of satisfaction that is difficult to achieve otherwise.

(Build a habit of journaling your to-dos and accomplished tasks with Harold.)

📦 Compartmentalizing social media

Another habit I've developed is compartmentalizing my social media usage, particularly on Twitter. I tend to get easily distracted by it, so I've started having "Twitter sessions" during specific times of the day.

(Build a habit of only checking Twitter 2 times a day with Harold.)

🏃 Getting moving

Lastly, I've made an effort to incorporate more physical activity into my routine. Despite being relatively young (:D), I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer, and I'm already starting to feel the negative effects on my health. To combat this, I've made it a habit to take frequent breaks and move around, whether it's by standing up to work, taking my dog for a walk, doing some gardening, or simply doing the dishes.

That’s a wrap!

Thanks for sharing with us, Thomas! You’ve inspired me to keep shipping and tweeting.

And thanks for the back and forth with me over Twitter DMs trying to figure out how the heck you’re getting all of this traffic! Will definitely have to keep an eye on it. 👀

Stay up to date with Ali:

Twitter: @T_Zahil

Uneed: uneed.best

Oh, and one last thing! Stay updated on all the cool work of our past makers with the Maker of Habit Twitter list. It’s an awesome way to feel more connected to the maker community.

What maker do you want to see featured next? Reply to this email and let me know.

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The Honest Guide to Indie Making

I spent 2 months writing 50k words about my journey going full-time on my side project. The Honest Guide to Indie Making is a thorough documentation of everything I learned about validating my idea, getting my first 100 signups, SEO, running a beta, etc.

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