PLG SaaS case: How to practice the automatic growth strategy of external links?

First of all, any business logic, the growth of optical traffic, is useless if it cannot be realized.

Just like a blog group posting efficiency enhancement tool, there must be corresponding users, and there must be portraits corresponding to the paying user groups . The rest is to rely on traffic growth, let users see your products, use products to solve pain points, and naturally they will pay.

The following is roughly shared from three points:

• User Pain Points -> Find the Real Paying User Group
• product value
• PLG growth

1. User positioning

1.1 User Pain Points

This is the core product map of the blog group. Mainly, a technical original blog can be sent to 10 domestic technical content UGC platforms with one click .

Let’s talk about the background first. Since I have been writing technical original blogs, I started to do self-media. One way to obtain traffic from self-media IP is to publish dry content on each UGC platform (commonly known as: content community).

The markdown editor was not popular at the time, and the corresponding images were incompatible on each platform. Just imagine, every time you write an article, copy and paste it to 10 platforms, and adjust the format, so it takes hours to complete the whole process of mass posting.

At this time, how to greatly improve the efficiency is a pain point. How to find pain points, remember this old saying:

A good product is to turn itself into a user, or just be a user.

1.2 Group portrait of paying users

Who is the user portrait? It can be exhausted:

• Technology Blog Webmaster
• Technology from the media, similar to Shen Jian, the owner of the "Architect's Road"
• The technical content operation of technology companies is similar to the operation of Youzan developers
• A technical product or open source project content operation , similar to ServiceMesher community operation
• and many more

Of course I didn't expect so many group portraits at the time. I am the webmaster and self-media myself, so I started this product development & launch. It was later discovered that the real paying user groups were the third and fourth. So why?

Let’s talk about the pain points of paying users first. What really makes them experience value must be to meet the rigid needs and high frequency quadrants :

• High frequency is definitely needed
• Just need not necessarily high frequency

So the answer is: there is only technical content and other operations, and they have downstream teams to create content, which can ensure the creation and operation of technical content every day. Then they must be high frequency, and helping them improve their efficiency must be just needed.

2. Product value

Good product features satisfy three points: how to greatly improve efficiency, how to greatly reduce costs, and how to greatly improve user experience

The value of this product has two goals:

• How to send group fast
• How good is the hands-on experience

After simply registering a platform account, there are three steps:

• Open 10 UGC accounts and log in
• Click to authenticate and authorize each community channel
• Create a new article, click on the group to send

2.1 Newcomers guide OnBoarding

Considering the link of authentication and authorization, the steps are actually cumbersome and not enough for novices. Then how to design a newcomer guide:

• Welfare setting: After completing the novice task, send it to the member
• In each task link, you can check whether it is normal and guide you

3. PLG Growth

As shown, from Ahrefs tool analysis:

• The domain name corresponding to the external chain increases. It is currently the domain name corresponding to more than 600 external links
• The page corresponding to the external link grows. There are currently more than 170,000 external page links

3.1 Growth Mechanism of PLG Model

PLG has several growth mechanisms:

• Word-of-mouth communication : good product experience, word-of-mouth communication (such as iPhone)
• Collaboration mechanism : you have seen a lot of videos, documents, project management, etc.
• Reward mechanism : Through certain "rewards", users can share for free, forming network effects and fission growth

The mass blogger's performance-enhancing tool is to satisfy the third " reward mechanism ".

3.2 How to lead to the growth of external links

So many external links are equal to so many recommenders, so it will bring constant traffic.

So how do you generate so many external links?

It's very simple, isn't it mentioned above? The real paying users are operators of technical content and so on. That's not paying users, it should be free, and let them be promoters.

According to the data, many users have a single-digit number of mass postings per month, so it is free, but the free one is actually the most expensive .

When free users post articles in groups, slogan and a link will be displayed at the bottom of the article by default: "This article is published by OpenWrite, an operating tool platform such as blog group posting!"

There are many such cases, such as the bottom of each product page or order page in Youzan Mall, why there is "Youzan technical support"; like Wordpress's powerby. As shown in the figure: more than 140 million external chains:

In this way, in the network effects and connections, let users spread your product out by the way. Most importantly, ultra-low marketing costs

3. Summary

The essence of business is profit, profit = income - cost. That PLG growth can greatly reduce costs, that is, marketing costs. So, any product:

• Product is King
• In the product, consider the PLG self-growth point

Source: The public account "The Road to SaaS Entrepreneurship", an ordinary person on the road to SaaS entrepreneurship, likes to share some down-to-earth experiences and gains as much as he can