SEO was always a long-term play, very slow in reaction. You publish something on your blog and then you have to wait for a couple of days before (if you’re lucky enough) the Google and Bing are aware of your new piece of art. Even if you notify them via the webmaster tools, from what I saw it was always taking minimum 2-3 days in order to show up in search results. Every single time.

Not anymore. The game has been changed completely. Let me share with you what has just happened to me.

This weekend I posted an article on a blog. I simply published the material, and right after that I’ve routinely submitted the new link to the Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters (via IndexNow). That’s it.

What caught me by surprise is that when I checked the analytics after a couple of hours I noticed that traffic started flowing to the new blog post already. And it was quite a spike actually, that’s why I noticed it. But I was genuinely surprised by the speed of indexing nowadays. It took no longer than 2 hours before my post started appearing in both: search engines and AI responses. This is such a game-changer!

Okay, it was a hot trendy topic, which might be partially related to the virality and the rapid speed of indexing. But the point is that it’s more than possible. It’s already available to everyone. And you don’t have to have a very reputable website for that.

We are living in incredibly fast-moving environment. It’s really the time to ship fast! 🚢 🚀

Publishing a Press Release is quite a popular tactic for marketing a B2C product. I’ve heard about it when I just launched my product, but at that time I was busy with lots of different things and, in general, I was way too distracted. So I knew about that, and I obviously ignored it for quite some time.

A few months ago, I’ve stumbled upon some press release service and started thinking about that again. And this time, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve chosen a new feature on our website that I wanted to share with the world, registered at PRLog.org, and submitted an article. It costed me $49 and promised a distribution of the article across the 8000+ subscribers, Google News, other news websites and more.

Have I noticed any effect on traffic?

Not really. At least, not an immediate one. To be honest, I was expecting some kind of spike in traffic, but it didn’t happen. However, after a while I noticed a bunch of new backlinks from the multiple websites that published that article. And I think it made some positive effect on the website rankings and slightly improved the trust. But it’s far from magic.

Another shot

A couple of weeks ago I decided to do it again. I used the same service and the package. This time the publication took me even less time, because I had the pre-filled account already, which is nice. Again, no immediate effect. I keep monitoring the website, but when you apply multiple tactics at the same time, it’s difficult to say certainly what exactly caused the increase or decrease in traffic and visibility.

What is common perception about Press Releases?

I’ve recently read a discussion on this topic on Reddit. And you know, in the digital marketing space, and among SEO folks specifically, I noticed controversial opinions. Some people claim that it positively impacted their websites, at the same time others say that it may have a bad impact and search engines don’t value press release distributors. What I noticed is that the majority of backlinks are indeed not the best quality. But, I also didn’t see any domains with high spam rating. That’s why I still believe that it shouldn’t do any harm.

Thoughts

So, what do we get from such a press release? A bunch of average backlinks obviously. And in my opinion it’s definitely worth doing for new projects. When you have low Domain Rating / Domain Authority, I think it’s more for the good. You need at least some visibility. And it’s exactly what you get quickly with a Press Release. But it certainly becomes less efficient when your project is gaining weight.

What do you think? Are you practicing press releases for your business?

I’ve started spending time on Reddit around 4 years ago. First seeking for answers regarding technical challenges I had at that time, and then it slowly became my daily routine. I basically use it as a social media, a source of news and trends. And when you spend on Reddit enough time you start seeing patterns, what works and what does not.

Reddit is a very different beast when it comes to marketing. It’s well known for its zero tolerance for direct marketing. There is an absolute zero chance that you post a text explaining how nice your product is, attach the link to it and get positive feedback and upvotes. At least, I haven’t seen this and it never worked for me. Instead, you’ll be either immediately banned as a spam or heavily downvoted with lots of sarcasm and negativity in the comments section. It’s just how it works. Reddit community hates BS and direct promotions.

So how to navigate Reddit as a marketer? The truth is that I still learn it. It’s tricky but it’s definitely possible to get some quality links and traffic from this platform. Let’s explore some things that I try to avoid and things I do for marketing my products and services.

DONTs (feel free to try tho)

1. Never attach the link to the product/service you talk about in the post. From what I see it’s the reason number one to get automatically flagged as a spam, so the post rarely passes moderation and get published.

2. Avoid talking about the product itself as much as possible. Focus on a problem you face and try to solve, explain what you tried already and why it didn’t work.

3. Don’t try to compete and outsmart the community. And don’t take it too seriously.

DOs (can work for you also)

1. Earn your karma. Many subreddits require you to have a certain amount of karma before you can comment/post on them. Start with interacting with all sorts of subreddits you like - post, comment, engage. It will bring you karma in case your posts/comments are upvoted. But remember, on a flip side, the downvotes cause damage to your karma.

2. Ask questions. This is probably the most powerful thing on Reddit. Be specific and concrete when articulating your requests, and you can get incredibly useful feedback on the topic. If it’s related to your product and you see people in comments struggle with that problem also, it may be the right moment to drop them a link in comments or DMs.

3. Stay a human and write text by yourself. I saw too many blames in the comments that the post is written by AI. And they have a point. I think Reddit is not the right place to write beautiful AI-generated text. It appreciates authentic and raw content.

Did the marketing on Reddit work for me?

I take it similarly to SEO meaning that the effects are often not immediately visible. But some comments stick, get visible and the posts might be indexed well by search engines. I keep getting traffic from Reddit comments that I published a couple of years ago. Again, it’s similar with old good SEO - some things work, others don’t. But in general, I think it’s definitely worth trying. It also might be a good way to get crawled by LLMs and show up in the AI output ultimately.

Bonus

Regarding the tools for marketing on Reddit. I’ve seen many of them and tried a few. I didn’t see much value from using them (even for free), apart from one tool that’s I’d like to share with you. It’s a free tool called F5Bot.

The idea is simple - track interesting/niche keywords or your brand mentioning, so you can quickly react on that. First replies tend to stick and show up better.

These are my takeaways from using Reddit as a user and a founder/marketer. What is your experience on Reddit? Share it in the comments, I’m genuinely curious to hear it!

Till the next one!

This is the first article in my newsletter/blog and I’ve decided to start sharp - with a real practical case study that I’ve indie-hacked half a year ago. It’s not the rocket science, but still a clear transformation on the way to improve my overall SEO rankings. And I’m about to disclose what I’ve done exactly and what was the result. Let’s go!

What is DR (Domain Rating)

Domain Rating is a metric invented and maintained by Ahrefs - SEO suite for digital marketers. It’s similar to Moz’s DA (Domain Authority), but calculated in a different way (how exactly nobody knows apart from the internal team). Basically these metrics are something that gives you an idea of how your domain is valued by search engines. It sits in the range from 0 to 100, and if you have 50+ you’re already in a very strong position normally.

If you want to track your domain’s rating, you can do it for free. I actually don’t use the paid plan of Ahrefs and only rely on free features for now. The Ahrefs’ dashboard is fortunately free. So you just need to register on the website and import your domain from Google Search Console (or manually). It’s quite handy and totally recommended.

Where did I stand

When it comes to my project, I ignored (actually tried but never approached it seriously) SEO for a long time and my domain’s rating was stable around 3 (yeah, that bad) for a couple of years. As an engineer I was always spending too much time on the product, and way too little effort allocating to the marketing aspects. But the last year I’ve decided to try again. To learn and apply some SEO techniques. And the decision was to start from boosting the domain rating.

Long story short: as you can see from the screenshot below - it surprised me in a good way. After I started applying my SEO work, the DR first went from 3 to 7, and then from 7 to 39 in one go. Quite crazy and very unexpectable! It looked like a pure magic. Since then it slightly degraded and settled at the level of 30, but this is still exactly 10X from the initial value.

In September Google Search has rolled out a big update and many domains lost rating. As you can see it affected my domain, but compare to some other domains I have, the impact here was limited and it’s pretty much flat since that time.

What did I do

I decided to primarily focus on building backlinks. After researching the ways of obtaining permanent backlinks, I’ve chosen two different tactics:

1. Buy backlinks on the marketplace

2. Buy expired niche domains with existing DR and build a network of small blogs linking to the main website.

I’ve decided to execute them in parallel.

1. Backlinks Marketplace

I know there are multiple marketplaces for this purpose. I’ve tried only this one so far - MeUp.com. It has quite a powerful search and lots of options to choose from. I targeted websites with DR 30+ and price below $100. In total I’ve purchased 4 backlinks (3 guest posts + 1 innerpage link) and spent around $300. In my case I had to pay extra for the sensitive niche (trading). So for you it might be slightly cheaper in general.

I’ve written guest posts myself and uploaded them on the platform after checkout. Within few days the articles were live.

2. Build network of microblogs

Since I’m a tech person, building a small SEO-performant blog is not a big deal. And I know the ways to build and host it for free. In your case you might want to consider some services like Bullet.so - I’m using this one for the main blog connected to our platform. It works pretty well. Anyway, there are plenty of blog hosting solutions, you can easily find one for your needs.

The most important factor here is not the blog itself, but rather the domain you host it on. There are so-called expired (deleted) domains, and I was interested in those ones. Deleted domains, that can be purchased for the regular price, but still have a history and domain rating attached to them.

To find such domains I used the combination of two tools:

1. ExpiredDomains.net - free service for searching deleted domains. Sign up for a free account and you can perform unlimited searches. I ended up searching domains that contain my niche keywords and sorting them by different metrics. To narrow down the results I applied a filter to only display deleted domains, the ones that were deletet recently, and only popular TLDs (.com, .net, .info).

2. Ahref Backlink Checker - it’s also a free tool from Ahrefs to check domain rating and backlinks. So whenever you see potentially good domain name available for purchase, put it in here and you’ll see what kind of backlinks it has already and what is its DR.

Be ready to spend some time before you find a decent domain name with good rating and qualitative backlinks. But it’s a fun activity, I kind of liked it. Still thinking if I should automate this process at some point, would be nice.

Ideally, to really crush this tactic, you want to also reproduce existing backlinks on those domains, so they don’t get lost. However, I’ve decided to not go that way and simply built fresh websites. I ended up building 5 websites on domains with DR in the range of 20-50. Unfortunately, after a couple of months their DR started degrading, and now only one domain still has DR of 18, others are less than 10. But I still have blogs running and updating occasionally. Let’s see how it will go.

Timeline and results

It was the second half of July 2025 when I decided to act. And as you can see on the screenshot the results showed up in around a month since I started.

In terms of traffic on the website, I didn’t see immediate increase or spike. So DR is not a magic pill and actually has nothing to do with Google rankings, but underlying mechanisms like backlinks are important. They definitely affect how Google ranks your website. The more backlinks you have the better. However its important to have links from domains that have higher DR than yours. Ideally 50+.

Alright, time to wrap it up. Actually, I could go deeper into details on each specific section, but then it’s going to be a too long read. Let’s continue in the comments. In case you have questions about some parts - let me know. I’ll be happy to answer in details.

Stay tuned for more stuff, and happy marketing!

My name is Yuri Drabik. I’ve been doing software engineering for the last 10 years or so. During my engineering career I was non-stop experimenting with small indie web projects. And as any engineer out there, the marketing was a tricky bit. Every Single Time.

Somehow, ideas that were coming to my head were always related to digital products in the B2C space. Slowly, the projects started looking more serious and relatively big. And the last project I started in 2020 is an absolute champion across my projects so far.

During this indie-hacking experience I’ve tried many different tricks and hacks in order to boost the website visibility online and acquire more users. I still find it difficult and don’t think I’m an expert in any way. But I’ve realized that I actually started enjoying the process. Slowly, the SEO results start being visible, there is a bit of traction and hope. And I noticed that I’ve got an urge to start sharing my mind online.

I think that the B2C marketing space is way underserved. SaaS business in general is a super crowded place nowadays, looks like every second person in the world is running their own SaaS. And it’s extremely difficult to compete, stand out and find your potential customers.

And this is the reason why I started this newsletter. Idea is to focus specifically on the digital marketing for a B2C SaaS. Surprisingly, I see the B2B space is covered much better and there is a way more information and resources on that. Hence, it’s time to fill the gap and make the B2C great again!

Welcome to the club!