Ahrefs - Ahrefs' Weekly Digest #76

Hey there,

In case you missed it, we’re still hiring! 

Check out the open positions we have on our marketing team—and if there’s one you’re interested in, feel free to apply for it. 

All right, let’s move on to this week’s newsletter. As always, click through to read each post. Or if you’re busy, read the tl;dr below each link:

✍️ New on our blog


AARRR Pirate Metrics Framework: What It Is & How It Works by Mateusz Makosiewicz

The AARRR metrics framework, also called pirate metrics or the AARRR funnel, is a set of metrics used to track and influence critical user behavior that can lead to business growth. It stands for:
  1. Acquisition – How do you attract people to your business? How to make them find your message (or have your message find them) and visit your website or your app? And lastly, how to measure all of that? Generally, the more people you attract in the acquisition stage, the more paying customers you will have in the last stage of this funnel. 
  2. Activation – The activation stage is about determining, engaging, and measuring the actions you want people to take to experience your product or service. These include signing up for a free trial or a free tool, filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter, watching a product demo, etc.
  3. Retention – This stage is about encouraging activated users to come back. The idea behind this is if people repeatedly visit your business, it’s a sign that they want more of what you offer—possibly even enough to buy from you. Conversely, if people don’t come back after activation, it’s likely they’ve lost interest in making a purchase.
  4. Referral – The referral stage should answer the question, “How do we know people like us enough to recommend us, and how can we influence that?” When someone likes your product enough to tell others, that can’t be a better sign that you’ve created something of great value and people are ready to pay for it.
  5. Revenue – After your visitors become activated users, some of them become paying customers. Dave McClure—the creator of the AARRR framework—advises startups to figure out what part of their product or service should be monetized.

Besides AARRR, there’s also RARRA. This is the pirate metrics “remixed” by Thomas Petit and Gabor Papp with mobile startups in mind (but RARRA could probably be used by any startup). It goes like this:
  1. Retention – Focus on creating a product that people will want to come back to
  2. Activation – Let people experience the value of your product (aka the “aha moment”) as soon as possible
  3. Referral – Get your users to talk about the app and share it
  4. Revenue – Find ways to monetize the product
  5. Acquisition – Scale and optimize your acquisition channels; do it only after you have clear signals that people are willing to come back to your app


How to Become a Successful Content Creator by Si Quan Ong

I am a content creator who creates content for the Ahrefs blog. How did I become one? Here’s the process I followed:
  1. Choose a niche to develop your knowledge and skills – The core of content creation is about your ideas. So you need a topic to write about. I started with breakdancing and ended up writing about marketing. 
  2. Choose a content creation skill you’d like to develop – Choose a content format and then develop skills in that area. Evidently, I chose writing, but there are other skills too, such as podcasting, photography, design, and video production. 
  3. Create a “Do 100” project – If you want to learn how to create content, you have to create content. Quantity eventually leads to quality. Commit to making 100 of X, where X is the content creation skill you want to improve. 
  4. Get a job as a content creator – This is not a necessary step, but it’s one that I followed. I don’t regret it, as I picked up tons of other marketing skills. If you’re trying to get a job as a content creator, I recommend looking through job boards and finding one that fits you.


Marketing vs. Advertising: What’s the Difference? (10 Examples) by Michal Pecánek

For many people, marketing is synonymous with advertising. Even some marketers use both words interchangeably. But the truth is advertising is only a small part of marketing.

Put simply: All advertising is marketing, but only a small portion of marketing activities is advertising. This image illustrates the idea perfectly. 



The Only 3 Google Analytics Metrics You Need to Track by Kayle Larkin

There are over 100 different metrics available in Google Analytics (GA), but only three metrics are useful for tracking growth over time:
  1. Users – At the most basic level: learn if your marketing efforts are resulting in site growth
  2. User engagement – Understand what content users are engaging with and what fails to earn their attention
  3. Conversions – User activities that contribute to the success of your business


13 Content Promotion Tactics to Get More Eyeballs on Your Content by Si Quan Ong

If your newly published article is not read by anyone, then it cannot do its job to persuade, engage, or sell. You have to promote it. 

Here are 13 tactics you can use to promote your content:
  1. Do SEO – Follow the strategy laid out in the next article (Orchard Strategy) to learn how to do this well
  2. Make your content shareable – Add social sharing buttons, create shareable images, and bake “link triggers” into your content
  3. Share it with your audience – What we do every week in this newsletter!
  4. Email people mentioned in your content – Reach out and tell people you’ve featured their work in your content
  5. Add internal links to newly published pages
  6. Get your employees to share – Leverage on the people who work for you, produce content for you, and likely use your product—they're in the best position to promote your content
  7. Share content in relevant communities
  8. Repurpose your content – Turn your content into different formats and share them on different channels
  9. Get featured in newsletters
  10. Republish content on third-party sites – Self-syndicate your content on platforms like Medium and LinkedIn or find sites that accept syndicated content
  11. Publish multiple guest posts on other blogs – Use your existing article as a base and create standalone articles from it, then submit these “splintered” articles as guest posts
  12. Contact people who wrote something you’ve covered
  13. Run ads


The Insanely Simple SEO Strategy for 2022 (The Orchard Strategy) by Joshua Hardwick

The most successful SEO strategies revolve around the efficient creation and optimization of content. The strategy we like is what we call the Orchard Strategy.

Here’s the process:
  1. Plant trees (pages) – First, do keyword research and publish optimized content.
  2. Pick low-hanging fruits (first-page keyword rankings) – As time passes, you’ll (hopefully) start to rank well on Google. Given that there is an exponential decline in clickthrough rates on the first page, keywords ranking in positions #2–10 are arguably the lowest hanging fruits in SEO. You should also consider how much value those keywords and pages bring to your business.
  3. Squeeze more juice out of them (optimize) – Figure out the possible reasons why your content is not ranking higher and make improvements in those areas. Here’s the process we recommend.

📹 New on YouTube


DoorDash’s $41M/Month Landing Page Review by Sam Oh

DoorDash reported $850 million in revenue in 2019. And in 2020, that number grew by over 300%.

This growth rate was triggered by the pandemic, as people weren’t going to restaurants and supermarkets. As a result, food delivery skyrocketed.

DoorDash continued to grow and rapidly gain more market share in the food delivery space in 2021. One reason for the consistent growth is its strong presence in organic search, where its competitors failed to appear.

And a big contributor to this success is its “restaurants near me” page, which has a traffic value of $41 million. 

According to Sam and Patrick’s opinions, the three main reasons why DoorDash is ranking well are:
  1. It matches search intent better than the rest of the pages.
  2. It has some relatively well-done on-page optimizations.
  3. It points tons of internal links to this page.

📚 What we’re reading


Ahrefs' Genius Moves to Replace Google [Video]

Guillaume Moubeche, the CEO of Lemlist, breaks down our product and marketing strategy in exhaustive detail in this 40-minute video. 

It covers our content strategy, YouTube strategy, newsletter, onboarding, free tools, and more. 

Note that we weren’t involved in making this video. So some of the statements in the video are incorrect. But on the whole, the video captures our marketing philosophy and journey pretty well.



Toxic Links: Here’s Why You Can Often Ignore Them [Article]

Marie Haynes Consulting is closing down its disavow blacklist tool. The reason: For sites that benefit from disavow work, the types of links that need to be disavowed are likely not on its disavow blacklist and, as Google’s John Mueller puts it, are ones that a tool is unlikely to identify.
Till next time. ;)

Cheers,
Si Quan
Content Marketing @ Ahrefs

P.S. We’re experimenting with adding more content to our newsletter. What do you think? What should we improve? What should we add? Let me know by replying to this email.
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