Growing Lists Kit

The interesting thing about building out my SaaS Starters and Directory Starters directories is how it’s helping me conduct ‘competitor research’ - basically learning how others run their boilerplate business, and giving me ideas, do’s and don’ts on how I can run mine, for Lists Kit.

I definitely can’t and don’t want to run it like Marc Louvion, because I’m not the influencer type, that’s not my strength. Seeing how other directory builders do their SEO for their directories got me inspired - that’s an approach that’s more suited for me. It’s also interesting to observe tricks and hacks from outside of my indie hacker circle, like how some WordPress directory themes do it.

So, just to sum up the thoughts and ideas on how to grow Lists Kit:

• Buy Ahrefs for 1 month, do SEO keyword research on top keywords to optimize for. Like should I go for “info directory”, or “business directory”? Which has higher search volume? I don’t even know the answer to something as basic and fundamental as that.
  
  
• Add long tail pages manually, especially for my SaaS Starters directory like “Best Next.js SaaS boilerplates with Tailwind, MongoDB, Stripe”. No programmatic SEO here, just manually coding a plain HTML, CSS and Javascript in a single index.html with the long tail content, on a long tail subfolder URL like listskit.com/saasstarters/nextjs-tailwind-mongdb-stripe.
  
  
• Add blog pages? Related to long tail pages, but more as a general resource for setting up Lists Kit, and/or to compare Lists Kit as a tool compared to others, or top 10 boilerplates kind of content. Related to point #1 about researching the right keywords to rank for. Maybe I can finally use my Blogstatic subscription!
  
  
• Add affiliate links. This seems pretty standard in the boilerplate maker scene. Payhip already allows for affiliates, so adding the affiliate programme is just a matter of adding the affiliate registration page URL to the landing page.
  
  
• Create course?! Gumroad course? Something to think about for the future, but in my research for boilerplates, I’ve seen boilerplates being sold as part of a short course on say, “Build your first SaaS”. Could open up the market to nocode or non-technical folks who might have some basic familiarity with HTML, CSS and Javascript to try a HTML template, but prefers having someone handhold the setup through a walk-through tutorial (pretty much like my plugins).
  
  
• Freemium? Create free, basic version of directory template. I think people sometimes like to try things out before buying, especially for code. Most boilerplates don’t offer freemium or a try-before-you-buy experience. Could be a way to contrast and stand out.

Lots of things to try!