How To Start A Startup
How we built ContactOut to 8 figures in revenue. Video series with screen shares.
The next step is to find modifiers with high traffic. For example, in ContactOut's case, we were targeting person name + email. We want to find people's names that are really popular and have a lot of traffic, so lots of people will search for their email.
What we did was take a list of the most common first names and a list of the most common last names — like 100,000 names for each category — and then we combined them. We ended up with millions of full names. Then, we ran this list of full names through Ahrefs, and we were able to get the traffic volumes for the most searched names, like "James Smith email" (name + email).
What we also did was go onto LinkedIn. We did a scrape of all of LinkedIn, and we looked at the people with the most followers, for example, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, and we made pages for those people because, you know, they have a lot of followers.
Something we also did was look at what pages on LinkedIn get the most SEO traffic. On Ahrefs, it will show you a list of people on LinkedIn that get the most traffic. You can also do this for other social networks like Facebook or Twitter to find the pages that get the most traffic, which will correlate to the most searched for and the most famous people. Presumably, people would want to find their emails.
We also looked at competitors, obviously, to see what keywords our competitors are targeting.
For example, our competitor RocketReach is also targeting, "Elon Musk email." An obvious place to start is just to look at the terms on Ahrefs that contain "email" — and you know, there's 1.2 million keywords here.
