In this post, I’ll bring you not one, but two separate Quuu Promote case studies. Both are “success stories” about how I – a complete “underdog” with no connections, no well-known site, no capital – was able to use Quuu Promote to get lots of traffic to my brand new website and improve my search engine rankings… in two completely different niches.
The traffic numbers that I’m about to present may not be too impressive for a lot of people, but I’m sure many newbie bloggers would love to be able to replicate my success.
So let’s start with the first example: a site that I built in the fitness industry.
Case Study #1: ManVsWeight.com (Fitness Industry)
I started ManVsWeight.com at the beginning of 2016. It’s a blog in the fitness niche, more precisely in the bodyweight training sub-niche.
When I started the site, I knew very well that creating ‘great content’ alone wouldn’t be enough to get visitors to my blog. I knew that I had to find ways to market and promote that content, instead of doing what Brian Dean calls the “publish and pray approach”.
Why did I start using Quuu Promote?
Shortly after I started my site, I remember getting an email from AppSumo about a company that I had never heard about before. It was a company called “Quuu“, and it promised to get you social shares from real people if you have high-quality content. It sounded interesting, so I subscribed for some Quuu Promote credits to test it out: now looking back, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made for my fitness blog.
After signing up, I started thinking about which posts of mine I should promote. I read a bunch of guides about how important it was to create “epic content” or “pillar posts“, so after a little thinking I came up with a list of my own posts to promote, including but not limited to these:
- 227 Bodyweight Exercises You Can Do At Home: The Ultimate List (inspired by Brian Dean’s SEO Tools collection)
- 113 Killer Pushup Variations
- 47 Real Role Fitness Models For Men (a “twisted roundup” post inspired by Tor Refsland and Smart Blogger)
- Bodyweight Training For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide
How did these posts do? Did they get any traction, did they get any shares? Well, here’s a GIF of me scrolling through all the dozens and dozens of notifications I got only from Twitter, all thanks to Quuu Promote:
And this is just a random, small sample of my Twitter notifications as a result of Quuu Promote. Sure, some of these shares were from smaller Twitter accounts, but many Tweets came from people with lots of followers. Just look at these two random examples who shared my posts with thousands and thousands of their followers:
As I said, to some people these results might not be so impressive, but you can imagine that as a complete nobody in my niche, I couldn’t even have dreamed about getting so many shares to my brand new posts on my brand new site.
This resulted in two great things:
Benefit #1: Increased Direct Traffic (Traffic Spikes)
Of course, I received lots of direct traffic through the social shares themselves: I ran a few promotions in September, October and November of 2016, and these resulted in traffic spikes that are clearly visible on the Google Analytics screenshots below:
Sure, Quuu Promote was not always solely responsible for these incredible traffic spikes to my few months old blog. However, I noticed that even when particular traffic spikes were not directly from Quuu Promote shares, Quuu still played a very import role indirectly. You see, some of the most significant traffic spikes came because a massive influencer in my niche shared one of my posts. And guess what… I noticed that many times the only reason these influencers learned about my blog post in the first place was thanks to Quuu Promote promotions. How did I know? I couldn’t explain any other way how a big influencer would have even heard about my no-name new site if not through the initial social shares that Quuu Promote generated. That was the only logical explanation.
So without Quuu Promote shares spreading the word, these influencers wouldn’t have found my site, and they certainly wouldn’t have shared anything from me. Even if I mustered the courage to ask them to share my stuff, I would have had to “knock on their doors” and promote myself directly, which I believe would have given a far worse impression than them naturally finding my content and deciding to share it on their own.
Benefit #2: Increased SEO Traffic (Help With Link Building)
Sure, getting direct traffic via social shares is great, especially for a brand new blog that is just a ghost town otherwise. But the best part of my case study is that once the Quuu Promote promotions expired, my traffic didn’t decline: on the contrary, my organic search traffic continued growing. Just look at this screenshot below:
Now, I’m not going to say that my improved search engine rankings were all because of Quuu Promote alone having such a positive effect on my SEO. Although, I do think social shares help new sites a lot with SEO, take a look at Case Study #2 below (also, it’s a well-known fact that social signals are essential Google ranking factors). However, I’m pretty sure I got this SEO traffic increase because of my solid outreach link building campaign. However, all the shares I got via Quuu Promote helped a ton with outreach link building because I had social proof in the form of share counters on my site.
I’m not going to say that my improved search engine rankings were all because of Quuu Promote alone having such a positive effect on my SEO. Although, I do think social shares help new sites a lot with SEO
Steve F. (@eBizCaseStudies)
See, outreach link building is all about convincing other site owners to link to you. I’m not going to go into a lot of details of why you should build links and why you should do it via reaching out to other webmasters in a white hat way because others have already done that before me. But in my experience, it all boils down to this: you must have content that’s good enough that other site owners and bloggers are willing to link to it.
What does this have to do with Quuu Promote?
Well, I found that people are much more likely to link to you if your site looks “socially active”, and that’s precisely what Quuu Promote will help you with. After all, who would YOU link to? A blog post that has a share counter that shows 3 shares, or a post with hundreds of shares? The answer is easy…
Unfortunately, I lost most of my displayed share counts after I changed my site from http to https (I’m not just making this up, but here’s a workaround I haven’t tried yet), so that’s why you can no longer see that some of my posts received thousands of shares.
To give you an example, the post that I’m the proudest of and that got over 2000 shares is the one called “227 Bodyweight Exercises”. With so many social shares displayed right on the post, it wasn’t hard to build hundreds of real, white-hat backlinks to it, which was enough to propel my no-name blog into a successful authority site in the bodyweight fitness niche.
Sure, ManVsWeight.com might not be the most prominent authority on its subject (i.e.: bodyweight fitness). Still, in case you’re wondering, it went on to receive over 1.2 million visitors since its start, which is a huge deal for me considering that I got bored with the project very early on and worked hardly anything on the site in the past two years.
But if you still don’t believe me or you’re not convinced enough that Quuu Promote had anything to do with this success story, let me show you the results I got with another brand new site that I built in a completely different niche.
Case Study #2: OnlineBusinessCaseStudies.com (Blogging & SEO Niche)
As I said, I got bored with ManVsWeight.com very quickly because I never really cared so much for bodyweight fitness or fitness in general. I thought that I did when I started the site, but after I wrote a few articles, I realized that I just didn’t feel passionate about the subject.
However, what has always fascinated me is entrepreneurship… So I started a site to document my entrepreneurial experiments, starting with my experiences with ManVsWeight.com. And that’s how OnlineBusinessCaseStudies.com was born.
Since I had once again started as a nobody in my niche, I had to get the word out. I turned to Quuu Promote once again as it didn’t disappoint last time… and it didn’t disappoint this time!
Since I had once again started as a nobody in my niche, I had to get the word out. I turned to Quuu Promote once again as it didn't disappoint last time… and it didn't disappoint this time! — Steve. F Click To Tweet
After a rather successful campaign in May and June of 2019, I got a ton of shares to my brand new posts (once again I made sure to promote epic posts only, like this one about “How I Ranked For 30,911 Keywords In The Competitive Fitness Industry (Keyword Research Guide)“).
Here’s another GIF of me scrolling through my Twitter notifications:
Once again, I got shares from established Twitter profiles as well with lots of followers (thanks to Jan Kutschera and Muthoni Wambugu):
The Results: Increased Direct Visitors and Improved Search Engine Traffic
What were the results? Here is a screenshot of my traffic before, during and after the Quuu Promote promotions (I had NOTHING going on other than Quuu Promote promotions, so all the results are 100% due to Quuu Promote in this case).
You can see that this time, too, I got a lot of traffic spikes during the promotion period. But once again, the most exciting part is that even after the promotions expired, my traffic remained higher than before starting the promos, thanks to increased search engine traffic.
To express this in exact numbers, in the four months before the promotions, I hardly received any traffic from Google: only a total of 22 souls arrived on my site via organic search.
But after the promotion was long expired (the last one ended on July the 7th), over 100 visitors arrived organically to my site in the coming 3.5 months
I know, I know: 100 visitors don’t seem like a lot. But once again, I got busy with other projects in my life, so I haven’t touched OnlineBusinessCaseStudies.com at all after starting the Quuu Promote promotions:
- I haven’t built a single backlink to it…
- I haven’t published a single new post (there are only 3 posts in total to this day)…
- I haven’t updated it one bit…
…yet the search engine traffic grew a little. And of course, I’m not the first one to state that increased social signals play a role in SEO as well.
Even if you think it’s not a serious achievement, if you consider how little work I put into setting it up (all I had to do was give a description to my Quuu Promote shares), it’s definitely an awesome return on investment!
Conclusion
In short, in my opinion, Quuu Promote rocks! I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to get the word out about their site. I especially recommend it to new bloggers who are just starting out and don’t even dare to dream about getting hundreds of shares from real people, including industry influencers!
Once again, I’d like to thank Quuu Promote for helping me quick start my online ventures, and I’d also like to thank AppSumo for referring me to them in the first place.
