MegaMaker - Update on this marketing experiment

As I've mentioned previously, I've contracted Josh Anderton to help update Transistor's marketing site.

I think some of the stuff we've worked on will be interesting to anyone looking to improve their site (especially SaaS companies).

I specifically chose Statamic as our CMS, because it allows you to build UIs for different elements of your website, making it easy to update different sections.

Here’s a video showing of some of the new elements we’re about to release on Transistor's homepage:

The idea behind this project was to give us a “kitchen sink” of different homepage elements that we could use selectively (but probably not all of them at once).

So far we’ve added:

• a customizable hero section at the top
• a section that shows various features
• a section with our podcast player
• a “feature blog posts” section
• a “podcast covers” section
• frequently asked questions
• “wall of testimonials”
• a new pricing section
• a reviews section

I used to have just a bunch of custom HTML on the homepage, making it difficult to update it (and have team members tweak difference sections). But now, Josh has built a UI for each element in Statamic, so anybody can easily update it.

A few things I've learned from this project so far:

Working with someone on marketing projects is fun. For most of my life, I've been working on marketing stuff by myself. With this project, it's been awesome to have a collaborator who is really good at building stuff (Josh).

Refreshing and iterating on top of our existing site has been better than a complete rebuild/redesign. For a while, we considered a complete redesign of the marketing site. I'm glad we decided to iterate on top of what we had already. It's allowed us to explore each section of the website, and improve what's there.

Treat high-traffic pages with the highest importance. Strategically, a lot of our focus over the past months has been on the highest traffic pages we see in Fathom Analytics:

This makes sense. Most of our traffic goes to our homepage and pricing page. Those are also the two pages we get most of trials from.

Track the SEO impact of all changes in SEOtesting.com. Every time Josh and I deploy a new major change to the marketing site, we create a new test in SEOtesting.

Search traffic is major source of new customers for Transistor. We want to be mindful of the impact of all of our changes on our search ranking, and the number of clicks we're getting.

Questions/comments/ideas? Reply to this email; I'd love to hear them.

Cheers,
Justin Jackson

PS: another marketing experiment I've been trying is hiring other indie makers to help me with things like YouTube video creation. James McKinven (a podcaster and Transistor customer) made us this this awesome "how to start a podcast" video:

Would love it if you gave it a watch and a 👍 (help other people see it on YouTube)
​
🐘 Find me on Mastodon​
⚡ Join me on MegaMaker​

​

​

​

​

​