436: When Long-Term Investments Finally Pay Off

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder. There's something deeply satisfying about watching the seeds you planted a year ago finally break through the soil. Figuratively even though I do enjoy growing my own tomatoes. Today, I do want to share a few stories from PodScan about what happens when long term investments start compounding. Some of those took eighteen or so months to materialize and others became possible only because I embrace tools that I thought I'd never touch. So this is a bit of a year in review although slightly delayed and probably incomplete. But I think there are lessons here that apply to any founder playing the long game and maybe you are gonna encounter a technology or a thought that you may not have thought about before. Now let me start with something that took real patience because that's the hardest thing to do as a founder, and that was our programmatic SEO efforts for PodScan. For a solid year and a half, I wasn't sure that they were working too well or at all, particularly in the beginning. But that's kinda obvious because things just take a while. And, obviously, each new page, particularly if it comes with a dot f m TLD like PodScan, has some work to do before it's recognized as a trustworthy location. But that seems to be happening now. And more and more, people are linking to particular shows or particular episodes directly using the podscan.fm link. And each of these backlinks from major newspapers like Wall Street Journal and Forbes and other places, wherever a podcast is mentioned, each of these backlinks increases the quality of the domain. The domain rating goes up and that obviously means better search result placements, higher trust value with these anti spam systems and generally people picking our page to link to when they need to reference a podcast. Also, it means a lot of people email me trying to place their weird spammy advertising stuff on my blog, but that's a different story. A good domain rating gets attention. The good kind and unfortunately the bad kind as well. But here's what I find particularly interesting from my business from the kind of business owner perspective. Podcasters themselves like the people running the shows are now putting links to their PodScan page into their show notes. And some of them, not all of them, but some of them have claimed their show on the platform as well. Others are just collecting links to every analytics service out there. Not exactly sure why they do it, but I'm glad they do. Either way, the name has become almost synonymous with podcast analytics in certain circles, and that's exactly what I wanted to accomplish. And this whole SEO effort has proved to be a very reliable lead generator. More and more of my prospects find their way through what is effectively user generated content, the podcast transcripts themselves. We just host the …