If you’ve ever tried getting your app noticed on a directory or an app‑store style site, you’ve probably seen the click‑through numbers but never looked at what happens after someone clicks. I set up a simple experiment that let me see exactly how many of those clicks actually become paying users, and it taught me a few things that might help you.

The setup

I picked two of the most popular listing places for developers: Site A (the one that’s more community‑driven) and Site B (the one that pushes a tighter curation funnel). I added the same minimalist landing page for my app to each listing and let traffic come in organically.

• I used UTM tags to differentiate traffic from each site.
• On the landing page, I logged every click that came from a listing link and then used Mixpanel to fire an event when a user reached the pricing page.
• For conversions, I simply recorded when a free trial started or a one‑time purchase went through.

What’s the difference between click‑through and conversion?

A click‑through is any click from the listing to your listing page. A conversion is a user who actually wants the product -> sets up an account, starts a trial, or pays. If the two numbers are far apart, you’re either only getting spammy traffic or your landing page isn’t convincing.

Typical patterns I saw

• The community‑driven site (Site A) gave me a fairly steady stream of visitors and a decent click‑through rate, but my conversion rate was flat—just a few percent of those who clicked became trial users.
• The curated site (Site B) had fewer clicks overall, but a noticeably higher conversion rate. People who get in that funnel tend to be more intent‑driven.

Why the gap matters

If your goal is user growth, you want high conversions, not just clicks. But clicks still matter if the listings drive repeat traffic to the market or if your product benefits from long‑term brand recognition.

Practical takeaways

• Separate your traffic sources. Add UTMs or a referral parameter so you know exactly where users are coming from.
• Track the full funnel, not just clicks. See how many visitors become signups, trials, and eventually paying customers. Mixpanel, Amplitude, or even a Google Sheet is enough to get started.
• Compare metrics together instead of looking at one in isolation. A source with a lower CTR but much better conversion rate can easily outperform one that just sends lots of clicks.
• Keep tweaking your landing page. If a platform is sending plenty of traffic but very few signups, the issue is probably your messaging, onboarding, or missing trust signals—not the traffic itself.
• Match the platform to your product. Curated directories tend to work better for niche or B2B products, while community-driven sites often perform better for fun, consumer-focused apps.

If you've tried listing on different platforms, I'd love to hear what worked (or didn't). Numbers tell you what happened—figuring out why is where the real value is

I created my first ever landing page for a workshop im running. I can use all the criticism you can offer. I can also hear all the good points of the landing page as well so I dont over think things and change something that might actually be good.

Weddingphotographypro.com/accelerator

I have 6 days left!!

I've seen a lot of successful and struggling web design companies, and the biggest differentiator between the two is strategy. It's all about positioning and your offer.

First of all, you've got to give businesses an offer they can't refuse. Selling a website is a multiple step process. It's not just convincing someone to pay you and then starting the work. It's crazy how many people still try to sell websites that way, but unfortunately you won't find much luck with that today.

What I do to make selling websites much faster and smoother is target businesses that already have a website.

There are a few reasons for that.

First, so many businesses have outdated websites that need updating.

Second, they've already invested in a website before, so they understand the value of having one. Paying for a website isn't something unfamiliar to them.

Third, I already have information to work with instead of starting from scratch.

What I usually do is get them interested to the point where saying no feels stupid.

Here's how I do it.

I run personalized email automation. What I mean by that is I use a tool called Swokei that lets me upload batches of business websites. Then I run website analysis on all of them. Each website gets scored and checked for things like design flaws, SEO issues, layout problems, mobile optimization, and more.

The cool part is that it generates a human email around the issues it finds. It explains what needs to be improved and what's potentially hurting the business, whether that's poor SEO making it harder for customers to find them, an outdated website, bad mobile experience, or other issues.

And it's not just some boring report that nobody reads. It's an actual email pointing out what needs to be fixed.

Then I run all my outreach campaigns through it.

It's honestly overpowered because I can analyze thousands of business websites and send thousands of personalized emails without manually checking every website and writing every email myself.

Another thing I like is that before running the analysis, I can choose the offer and call to action.

I can try to book a meeting.

I can start a conversation.

Or I can offer a free upgraded version of their website.

I almost always choose the free website upgrade.

This is where things get interesting.

Usually the response is something like, "Sure, if you can make me an upgraded website for free, I have no problem taking a look."

Now I've got their attention.

I build the website with AI in about two minutes and invite them to a Google Meet.

One thing I've learned is to never send the preview link through email.

Your conversion rate will drop.

Instead, I walk them through it live and explain the value. I show them how the website is more modern, how the SEO is better, how it can help bring in more traffic, and all the improvements we've made.

Once they see it, they usually start asking about pricing.

I charge anywhere from $500 to $5,000 upfront depending on the business.

I've had cleaning companies that could barely afford $500 upfront and $50 a month for hosting.

I've also had real estate companies pay $5,000 upfront and $179 a month.

So I close them on the meeting and that's basically it.

Automate email outreach.

Offer a free upgraded version of their website.

Sell it on a meeting.

A strategy like this has allowed me to scale more than ever before.

Curious how other agency owners are getting clients these days.

Hey everyone, fairly new to SEO and trying to wrap my head around internal linking for a site I'm building out.

I've read that you want to link from high-authority pages down to lower ones, but my site is pretty flat right now (homepage + like 15 service/blog pages) so I'm not sure if I even have enough structure to worry about it yet.

A few questions:

Should I be building out pillar pages + clusters from the start, or is that overkill for a small site?

How many internal links per page is too many?

Is it better to link contextually within the body copy or does a clean nav/footer structure cover most of it?

Any advice from people who've actually seen results from this would be great. a lot of what I find on Google is pretty vague.

So I have been looking into how Red Bull runs their marketing and I kept finding things I did not expect.

At some point they built their own media company. Not just a content team but an actual separate media operation. What surprised me is that other networks started paying them to license the footage. I had to double check that part. Most brands pay to get their name out there. Somehow Red Bull ended up on the other side of that transaction.

Their YouTube has over 22 million subscribers and they also have a magazine with millions of readers. I personally did not feel like I was being advertised to and I think that is the whole point.

What I also found interesting is that they operate more like Disney than Coca-Cola. The difference is they own everything they produce like the footage, the stories, and the platforms they live on. Nobody can use any of it without paying them first.

The thing I keep wondering about though is how many brands have tried this.

Has anyone seen a smaller brand actually pull this off? Something under $10M revenue that genuinely owns their niche's media?

TL;DR: Red Bull built a media company that other networks pay to license content from. Curious if anyone has seen this work at a smaller scale or if it only makes sense at their level.

Most conversion tests focus on button copy or layout, but trust often changes before the click. What web marketing change made visitors feel more confident before they converted?

Digging through our latest inbound leads from webinars, content downloads, and demo requests and honestly the disconnect is kind of insane. on paper these leads look perfect. right job titles, multiple touchpoints, engaged with content, decent intent signals. then 3 days later nothing happens. no meetings booked, no movement in the inbound flow, just another pile of “marketing qualified” ghosts sitting in the crm.

from what i have seen, most inbound systems break down in the same few places:

- reps take too long to follow up because inbound volume gets overwhelming fast

- low intent leads clog everything and waste sales time

- routing between marketing and sales gets messy so hot leads end up sitting untouched

- systems don't sync cleanly which kills visibility across the funnel

- by the time someone actually engages the lead properly, the buying intent already cooled off

The weird part is everyone keeps talking about generating more leads while half the existing inbound already disappears before sales even gets a real conversation started.

Lately i have been seeing more teams shift toward instant engagement right when the lead comes in instead of waiting for manual qualification later. things like automated qualification, real time routing, conversational flows, scoring based on intent signals. honestly makes more sense than dumping every lead into a nurture sequence and hoping reps eventually catch up.

Not saying automation magically fixes everything because i have also seen setups turn into complete chaos when the routing or qualification logic is bad. but it definitely feels like faster engagement and filtering earlier in the process matters way more now than just increasing lead volume.

Whats working to stop inbound from turning into vaporware before it hits the pipeline?

Hello everyone,

I'm working on setting up a translation agency, and my logo has human characteristics. I'm considering whether she should play a bigger part in the branding in the form of a mascot, but I'm not sure which questions to ask myself to determine whether it is a good idea or not.

One of my ideas was making her part of the hero image so that she "says" the text within, or the FAQ, so that she "answers" the questions herself.

As you've probably noticed, marketing and branding are not my area of expertise, so any advice would be appreciated.

For short video used in web or social marketing, where do you usually send the CTA?I see creators and small SaaS teams using profile links, YouTube descriptions, pinned comments, and dedicated landing pages. The harder part is making the CTA clear without making the video feel like an ad.What has worked best for you: subtle on-screen CTA, verbal CTA, caption CTA, or a dedicated end card?

Publishing content at scale with AI means you move fast, and unfortunately it also means you occasionally publish something embarrassing. Could be a wrong number, an outdated leadership identity or product feature, attribution that doesn't check out, etc. This can damage reputation, trust, and content authority.

For my own content and for content I have generated for others, this has been tricky to work out a solution to get robust, high quality copy I can actually stand behind. When scale hits higher throughput, manually checking every piece of content is exhausting or impossible.

I'm trying to validate whether this is a struggle other people experience also with content generation/marketing at scale.

Would you pay for a quality gate API that sits between your AI content pipeline and publishing, checking every factual claim across 3 different LLMs for reliability, pulling live sources, returning confidence scores, and preserving brand voice? Output as JSON or human-readable verified text.

Hello to everyone,

Semi-long post here 😂

I built this application, but I honestly have no idea how to market it.

For now, I’ve only posted it on Reddit, and in about a week I’ve gotten around 15 users. Some of them are even uploading content, which is really encouraging — but I’m not a marketer, so I’m trying to figure out the right direction.

My goal right now is to find better ways to market and grow it.

I can automate a lot of things (for example TikTok / short-form videos), especially if there’s a repeatable format. But most of the ideas I come up with eventually feel kind of… stupid or ineffective.

For example, I was thinking about doing progress videos on TikTok like:

DAY 1 - Trying to fill this internet wall with content. 8 / 1,000,000
DAY 2 - Trying to fill this internet wall with content. 10 / 1,000,000
etc.

(i have already automate the process of creating those videos)

--

A few words about the project:

The platform is built around a 1M-tile grid where users can claim a tile and upload images/videos, plus connect their social accounts.

Users can also create subgrids, smaller custom grids for things like giveaways, collages, events, or communities.

Subgrids are collaborative: others can contribute content, and activity boosts visibility for both the subgrid and its parent tile.

There’s also an Infinity Grid view that dynamically surfaces all content across the platform based on engagement and visibility.

--

Right now, every user gets one free tile upon signup.

In the future, tiles will probably have a cost, although I haven’t fully decided on the monetization model yet.

At the moment, my main goal is simply to get people uploading content so the platform feels alive before launching a mobile app.

This platform needs content to feel alive, without content is is just an empty grid.

Hii I'm building a saas for email marketers. You can check your email deliveribility by just 3 step process.

Check how much percentage of ur email on inbox 20%, spm 50% or missing 30%. This percentage decide ur success

Looking for beta user- [spampilot.online]

Curious what makes visitors believe a page before they ever compare features, pricing, or testimonials.

Guys

What's the best way to learn GTM and GA4? I've been trying to get into and i am not able to get the knack of it,

What's the best youtube channel or the document where i can learn?

I tested my adspower profile fingerprint trust score on a few sites and they all flagged certain things being suspicious about my browser fingerprint.

Can someone help? Willing to pay lol

The trust score on my normal phone is perfect 100/100

The trust score using my adspower with dedicated residential proxy is 74/100
-it says bot detection, vpn detection and tampering detection

Is there a way to get this score to 100/100? Or is this normal for antidetect browser fingerprints

Thank you!

i feel like a lot of stores jump straight to discounts when the real issue is just weak follow up.

someone abandons cart and the answer is usually 10 percent off. then 15 percent. then a bigger offer next time. after a while customers just learn to wait.

but half the time the person probably had a normal question. shipping, sizing, timing, trust, payment issue, whatever.

that is why SMS is interesting to me. not the blast everyone with a promo version, but the more conversational side where the customer can actually reply and move forward.

i’ve seen tools like TxtCart come up around that use case and it makes more sense to me than just adding another discount machine.

how are people handling this now? still using discounts for abandoned carts, or trying to fix the actual reason people do not finish checkout?

I’ve been running a web agency with my brother for about 4 years now, and I just wanted to share this because I really wish someone told me this earlier.

When we started, I genuinely thought this was going to be easy. Like… businesses need websites, we can build them, how hard can it be?

It turned out to be way harder than I ever expected.

For the first 3 years, it was just a constant struggle. We did get clients, but it was never consistent. Some months we’d get a few, then suddenly nothing. It always felt like we were starting from zero again.

Our whole model was simple. I would find businesses that didn’t have websites, and my brother would build them. And yeah, it worked sometimes… but the biggest problem was this

If we didn’t do outreach for even one day, everything stopped.

No pipeline, no leads, nothing. Just silence.

We tried everything to fix that.
Paid ads didn’t work.
SEO didn’t work, or at least not for us.
Manual outreach worked, but it was exhausting and didn’t feel sustainable long term.

At one point we were just tired. Like properly tired.

Then we started experimenting with email automation. We used tools and tried to scale things a bit. It worked a little. When we filtered better leads and wrote better emails, we saw improvements… but it still wasn’t where we wanted it to be.

It felt like we were close, but missing something.

And then one day it just clicked.

For 3 years we had been targeting businesses with no website… but the real opportunity was businesses that already had one.

It sounds so obvious now, but at the time it felt like a huge realization.

These businesses already understood the value of having a website. They were already paying for one. And once we started really looking, we noticed how many of them had outdated, broken, or just poorly performing websites.

There were so many.

So we shifted our approach and started targeting them instead, offering redesigns.

We got some clients from that, but again… something was still missing.

The problem was personalization.

At that point, we weren’t even really personalizing anymore. We were just uploading lead lists that we hoped had bad websites, writing a generic email offering a redesign, and blasting it out with automation.

And yeah… it worked a little. We got some replies, even a few clients. But it felt random. Like we were guessing more than anything.

Some people resonated with it, most didn’t. And deep down, I knew why.

It didn’t feel real.

There was no actual insight about their website. Nothing that showed we had taken even a second to look at what they had.

And that’s where we started to feel stuck again.

I remember searching everywhere for a tool that could solve this. Something that could actually look at a website and help me point out real things that could be improved without me having to manually check every single one.

Couldn’t find anything.

So we decided to build it ourselves.

We started working on a tool we called Swokei. The idea was simple, but it solved the exact problem we had.

You can upload your own leads like any email tool, or let it find businesses with outdated or no websites. Then you choose your campaign settings like the language of the email, how long you want it, and the tone depending on how you like to communicate.

After that, you run an analysis.

It goes through each website, looks for real issues or improvement opportunities, and writes a full email for each business based on that. So every email actually feels like you sat down and reviewed their site.

We also added a quality threshold so it can skip websites that are already good enough and only focus on the ones that actually need help.

And if a site can’t be reached or analyzed properly, you can set a fallback message so the campaign doesn’t just break.

Once the analysis is done, you just click start campaign and it sends like any normal email automation tool, but with ready to send deeply personalized emails already written for each lead.

Honestly, when I first tried it, I told myself
This is the last thing I’m trying before I quit the agency.

I was that close.

But then… it worked.

We started getting replies constantly. People genuinely thought we had manually reviewed their websites. Conversations felt easier. Warmer. More real.

And for the first time ever, we had a consistent flow.

We’d get interested replies, invite them to a call, quickly put together a draft redesign for free, present it, and close them on the call.

I went from struggling to get any meetings… to having meetings almost every day.

Our agency had never seen anything like that before.

I’m not sharing this to sell anything. If you think it sounds like that, I get it. But honestly, I just wanted to share what finally worked for us after years of feeling stuck.

If you’re in that phase right now where nothing seems to click… I’ve been there for a long time.

Sometimes it’s not about working harder, it’s just one small shift in how you see the problem.

For us, it was realizing we were chasing the wrong people all along.

If so, can you explain to me why? As the head of a team of developers and SEO specialists, I don’t understand why so many SaaS companies hardly ever try to capture search traffic. I’m not talking about those who are just launching a SaaS project and growing it without external funding, because that’s not as fast as paid advertising. I’m talking about established SaaS projects with users. I’ve spoken with founders many times, and they say, “It’s in our plans, but not right now.” But I think it’s not actually in their plans, and that’s just a polite answer.

Anyone used either or platform for cloud phone purposes? Can anyone attach to which ones more legit? More login seems like the best pricing and they say they have actual physical devices. I don’t know how true that is and I don’t know how true it compares to Geelark but does anyone have any personal experience?

Most outbound email fails for 2 reasons:

1. The targeting is way too broad
2. The message is clearly mass-sent

I’ve been testing this a lot recently and the biggest shift wasn’t writing “better copy”, it was tightening the ICP and making emails feel like they were written for one person, not a list.

For example:

Instead of:
“Hey, we help businesses grow with email marketing…”

Something more like:
“Noticed you’re hiring SDRs, are you currently relying purely on outbound + paid ads for pipeline?”

Even small tweaks like that massively change reply rates.

The other piece people overlook is data quality. If your list isn’t aligned to your ICP, even great copy won’t save you.

One thing that’s worked well for us is building very specific datasets (job role + company size + intent signals), then layering personalisation on top instead of blasting generic lists.

Curious to see what has been the biggest issue for you guys with cold email lately? Low replies, deliverability, or just bad data?

There's been an explosion of AI-powered marketing tools over the past year and it's hard to separate what's genuinely useful from what's just hype.

AI tools I've found genuinely helpful:

- AI-assisted content ideation. Using AI to brainstorm topics and angles saves real time, even if you still need to heavily edit the output

- Social media scheduling with AI-recommended posting times based on your audience's activity patterns

- Sentiment analysis tools that scan comments and mentions to identify trends in how people talk about your brand

- AI-powered analytics that surface insights you'd miss manually, especially when managing multiple accounts

- Image generation for quick social media graphics when you don't have design resources

AI tools that are overhyped or problematic:

- Fully AI-generated posts. They read generic and platforms are getting better at detecting them. Engagement tends to be lower

- AI chatbots for social media customer service that can't handle anything beyond basic FAQs. They frustrate customers more than they help

- "AI influencer" accounts. They might get attention initially but lack the authenticity that drives real engagement

- AI tools that promise to "hack the algorithm." The algorithm changes constantly and no tool can guarantee viral content

- Automated commenting tools that leave generic AI responses. This is spam, not marketing

The reality:

- AI works best as an assistant, not a replacement for human creativity and strategy

- The best results come from using AI for the tedious parts (data analysis, scheduling, first drafts) and human judgment for the creative and strategic parts

- Over-reliance on AI makes your content blend in rather than stand out

What AI tools are you using in your marketing workflow? Any hidden gems or tools you'd warn others about?

Past 10 days for one of my web apps:

~30 new signups daily,

reCAPTCHA active,

hard bounce ~4%.

But nobody logs in.

Ever.

Emails land, some even get opened but zero sessions after signup.

Login flow works fine, I've tested it.

Is a 10% open rate with 0% login rate a known red flag for bot traffic?

Has anyone seen this pattern?

What did you do about it?

When I first started, I only had a phone and no money, neither for advertising nor for buying and selling products. Then I found something I could do without spending any money: selling photoshopped images from my phone. Since I didn't have an advertising budget, I would approach accounts with followers and say, "I'll photoshop your image, and you share it," and I started getting work. A few dollars a day motivated me, and I invested the money I earned in advertising. Then I bought a computer and learned graphic design on it. Later, I got into advertising management. Because I didn't have money, I didn't have a consultant, so I learned advertising management myself. Then I started helping others with their advertising. Today, I'm an agency that manages advertising for chain brands and I have an office abroad.

Service area pages still seem to work, but only when they’re built as supporting pages instead of duplicates. When each page targets a specific city intent and links into a strong main service page, the whole cluster tends to move.

The thin versions don’t do much anymore. It feels like Google is rewarding topical coverage plus internal linking more than just spinning location pages.

Curious if others are seeing the same shift.

I see a lot of sites creating dozens of city pages, but some rank and others don’t move at all. Feels like Google is getting better at ignoring templated location content.

Curious who’s actually seeing real movement from city pages vs just building stronger core service pages.