How I'm getting backlinks for my startup

My startup traderstats.app is starting from zero in every sense — no followers, no paying customers, no email list, no backlinks.

This is my first solopreneur project and I’ve had a mountain of new things to learn (maybe you can relate). There’s actually building the product, testing it, asking friends and internet strangers to try it, making design that hopefully doesn’t suck, promoting the product… It’s a lot!

How do you get traffic to your site which will convert to paying customers? I didn’t know but was committed to figuring it out. First thing is to get I started learning the dofollow links and how I could I get them so my ranking and authority would improve.

I stumbled onto Marc Lou’s article about programmatic SEO and that opened my eyes to the possibility of getting traffic to my site without any direct extra work. There are ways to grow brand visibility without paying for ads or influencer shoutouts — just consistent founder work over time.

I’ve made a roadmap for myself of SEO growing steps that Twitter and the internet says will help. So far, I’ve increased my rank from 0 to 0.4 in the last week. I started actively working on SEO in October 2024. I update these metrics and image periodically so that it stays relevant.

In no particular order, here is the list of things I’m doing to get backlinks and improve my SEO so my startup will grow:

1. Posting to directory and list sites

Luke Miler shared this list of 40 websites to promote your startup and get free backlinks. Some of these sites are free, some of them pretend to be free and at the end hit you with a paywall, then others are paid. I chose to not pay for any from his list but did submit to all the free options that my SaaS was eligible for.

2. Building free tools as lead magnets

Another idea from Marc is free tool marketing. The main idea is you build a free tool that is one page, no sign up required, and is immediately usable and useful. You can put the tool on a separate domain and have it link to your main site, which helps ranking. You also add the tool inside the main site in a free tools area.

I’m building payoutcalc.com to help traders run important calculations as a lead magnet for Traderstats.

3. Programmatic SEO

You guessed it — I learned about this from Marc. This method is a bit involved but seems to be a huge multiplier of SEO success, especially for indie devs. You can read the specifics here.

I use Remix for my stack and have started building a blog. I’m getting the beginnings of the dynamic content generation working and will start generating pages. My goal is get 25 to 50 pages this way to start.

4. Writing on beehiiv

I noticed while reading beehiiv newsletters that the webpages were dofollow links. My goals here are to:

1. Write down what I learn as I build my own startups and provide value to others

2. Get link juice from beehiiv since they have high domain rating.

5. To be continued

As I learn more ways to get backlinks I’ll add on to this list and share how effective the efforts were. These are all the methods I’m exploring right now. I haven’t gained much yet but I think before long I’ll be at 1 DR, then 10. It will snowball from there.

Everyone says the key is to keep working at it, find ways to create value and get links to it. So thats what I’m doing. It can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months for SEO efforts to mature so its really important to just start. You don’t need to be perfect.

P.S. Marc if you are reading this thank you for all the great, actionable advice you give out — you are the best 🤝