How I'd grow SolidGigs

SolidGigs is a membership program for freelancers that selects the top 1% of freelance jobs.

It scours the web to find the best opportunities and then delivers one email daily to members.

There’s nothing to improve in their positioning. It’s very clear what the product does and who it is for.

I think they’re emphasizing the right benefits:

- Stop wasting time hunting for clients 
- Trade your worst clients for great companies

While I like their landing page copy and visuals, I think their conversion rate would improve if they considered the customer journey.

They don’t mention that it’s a paid product above the fold, and visitors are going to leave their email expecting to get it for free.

Guess what’s going to happen when they fill in the field and the next thing they see is an order form asking for their credit card?

SolidGigs could fix this by giving every new subscriber a one-week free trial and making that clear in their sign-up form.

They should also emphasize the fact that you’re not going to get generic freelance jobs, but those in your specific niche.

Users can submit their preferences (marketing, design, etc.) and they’ll get custom emails with those jobs.

Their “honest customer reviews” section is a good idea to increase trust but it needs to be actively managed or it’ll become a boomerang.

This doesn’t mean they should hide bad reviews, but they should reply to them and address the issues.

For a subscription site like SolidGigs, increasing customer LTV is the number one priority.

A community might be a good idea. 

People might initially sign up for the emails but they’d stay because of relationships with peers.

Another focal point should be improvements for reducing churn.

Freelancers can be fully booked and not need work, so I’d introduce the option to pause the membership without canceling.

They’re doing something very smart with affiliate marketing.

They selected websites that have high-ranking articles for popular keywords that match the solution their product provides.

Then contacted them and made a deal for them to link to SolidGigs.

Since freelancers network with each other, I’d brainstorm word-of-mouth marketing ideas. 

An option: a referral program with a strong incentive.

For example, they could tell existing members that they’ll get one month free for each referral.

Their search situation is pretty uncommon because they have a lot of links but zero content so they aren’t ranking for anything.

I can’t be 100% sure but I believe they attracted these links naturally over time as an indirect consequence of their affiliate deals.

Digging deeper, it turns out they do have a blog.

I discovered it by chance because there isn’t a link to it anywhere on the website. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t good for SEO - orphan pages tell Google that the content on them isn’t important.

Pro tip: internal linking is important:

- It passes the link juice across all the site pages
- It helps Google understand what your website is about.

If you have a blog, make sure that all posts covering the same topic are interconnected to create a topic cluster.

SolidGigs doesn’t have a social media presence. That’s not just a missed opportunity, but might also raise suspicions about the product’s legitimacy.

People do their research before spending money (especially on subscriptions), and that includes scanning social media.

Paid social could be a great way to scale (platforms like FB ads offer very granular targeting).

It’d be pretty easy to target a combination of interests like freelancers + UpWork with some ads that speak directly to their pain points (saving time, better clients, etc.).

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