Linkloud Feb 23 Offline Event Recap: Growth & Monetization

Why Is Measuring Growth Important?

"Small feature gaps, monetization too distant"

Although all partners and friends I know will attach statements like "Our technology/product in the market..." and "XXX performs better than ChatGPT/Claude..." when introducing products, (non-foundation model) applications have relatively small gaps in actual experience: at least in my view, they're generally at a 70-90 level; and new foundation models will continuously refresh performance, so the technical moat for current AI applications is almost non-existent.

On the other hand, most tool-type AI products I've encountered, though there are exceptions, are still in a stage where monetization prospects are unclear (also because large-scale monetization of AI applications is still rapidly developing); the good news is that more and more exceptions are emerging (as shown below), but most companies are far from discussing monetization levels.

Which Metrics Matter?

If your product isn't just launched, excluding actively found seed users, you should receive effective feedback 1-2 months after launch:

• MRR / ARR metrics don't need to be tracked for most companies yet; at this stage, traffic-oriented metrics are more important (metrics that are "almost none" aren't worth tracking)
• When growth is doing well and you start seriously considering monetization, you can look at metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost and Conversion Rate
• When starting some growth channels, you can focus on metrics like Return on Investment (influencer marketing), Customer Lifetime Value (discount marketing), and Return on Ad Spend (paid advertising)

Of course, as long as website traffic is growing rapidly, the above fine-tuned operations can be put aside temporarily; for the vast majority of websites, Website Traffic is the only thing that needs focus; absolute website traffic values can be monitored from GA or other analytics tools, while relative traffic values like traffic growth trends and comparisons with similar products can be viewed through third-party tools like SimilarWeb and Semrush; I do a lot of SEO, so I focus more on the absolute value of organic traffic and corresponding keyword rankings.

Why Is Website Traffic Low?

"Be honest with yourself, you definitely know how much traffic/users you have"

Low website traffic is also a very normal phenomenon: newly launched websites, teams that don't know how to do growth, and limited industry traffic ceilings are all possible reasons; remember that websites with good traffic are rare; most teams only start paying attention to this issue after failing at growth and acquisition; let me use Organic Traffic as an example: if you find that your website's organic traffic is low, or the keywords you want to rank for aren't ideal, it's probably a product positioning problem.

1. Over-Emphasis on Brand Promotion

Wanting to make a big splash, in more colloquial terms, "not speaking human language," using vague definitions that lead to unclear functional boundaries:

2. Not Communicating in User-Friendly Ways

The above is about unclear product positioning; this point is about knowing product positioning but not communicating it in user-friendly ways; Tome, Gamma, and Beautiful AI are all AI presentation generation products. Ranking these three websites from a product positioning and SEO perspective: 3>2>1

If you were searching for an AI Presentation Maker tool, which one would you click? Without knowing the brand, you'd definitely choose Beautiful AI - the answer is written on the question. Why not Gamma? Because 2 could also be a PPT Templates content site (not a tool) like Slidesgo. As for Tome, what does it have to do with your search intent? You'd choose this way, your users would too, and even Google would present search rankings this way. So how to test if product positioning is clear:

XXX + Function Words: This includes Generator, Creator, Maker, Builder, Changer, Shortener, Scraper, Converter, Downloader, Translator, Extender, Summarizer, Resizer, Remover, Extractor, Recorder, Rewriter, Solver, Calculator, as well as more general terms like Platform, Tool, Software, App, Provider, Assistant, Copilot.

Input + to + Output

3. Using New Demand or Non-User-Oriented Positioning, e.g., Agent

For products that are themselves new demands, user positioning is indeed difficult, such as Agent/Copilot products. If your product is this type, you can refer to websites that do it well:

Those that already have some related features: For example, if you want to promote a sales agent, you can first release some sales-related features, such as CRM, sales bots, etc.; you can build up this traffic first, then direct it to your agent product; pure Native Agent products usually have difficulty doing growth hard, as most paying users haven't accepted the Agent interaction form yet; even as someone who's been in the industry for a long time, I find it difficult to precisely define Agent.

Are We Underestimating SEO?

• Does it take six months to see results? Not necessarily
• When should we start doing SEO? From day one of building the site, it's already driving organic growth

I entered the industry relatively late (joined my previous company in August 2022) and didn't interact with the previous wave of SEO people; when I first entered, I kept hearing that SEO is a very long-term process, possibly taking six months to a year to see results; if "seeing results" means traffic has a very steep growth curve, then yes, it does require a very long process; if "seeing results" means pages are indexed, have rankings, and can get organic traffic, then you get good positive feedback in just one month: logically speaking, it's impossible for a website to have no traffic, then suddenly surge after 6 months.

Moreover, doing SEO now doesn't necessarily mean waiting for SEO to work before starting monetization: processes like keyword research, competitor analysis, content planning, and user demand mining themselves help products and businesses understand users and improve products; content creation and publishing are also doing Content Marketing, User Education, and even Community Building; the link building process is also doing PR, Partnership, and Business Development.

Most companies I've served started doing SEO from day one of product launch; it's more like content marketing around the product than SEO.

What Products Are Suitable for SEO?

SEO is essentially a traffic acquisition method centered around search demand, so products with more search demand and larger search volumes are definitely more suitable for SEO. From another dimension, search demand reflects users' clear needs, so products that can meet users' clear needs are more suitable for SEO. Specifically:

• Tool products: Users have clear use cases and needs
• Content products: Users have clear information acquisition needs
• E-commerce products: Users have clear purchase needs
• Service products: Users have clear service needs

Conclusion

So, the essence of On-Page SEO is that you can publish all content around brand, features, scenarios, input, output, prompt, processes, knowledge, etc., on your website in a structured way. These are what you can provide anyway, and SEO's role is to make these contents benefit you in traffic; even without doing SEO, you'd probably do these things anyway, such as showcasing image generation effects - you'd definitely do showcases. But if you do SEO, you can better utilize these contents.

Additionally, all image-type websites will do this content, just a matter of timing; sites like Civitai, SeaArt, OpenArt all have Models and Workflows, and all benefit from it; besides tool websites, upstream and downstream websites will also continuously generalize to do that content, like image libraries (Freepik), image-text material generation (Canva); I actually observed this trend in 2023 and wrote about it in a Jike post.