Starting Flywheels: Inbound & Micro-Influencers

First published April 15, 2021.

When you launch something new or join a company that has stalled, you need some quick wins. People need to see progress.

You also need to start on long-term growth right away. Those two goals don’t compete. You can work on both from the first week.

Here is one example. I joined a company whose website had very little traffic and almost no links from other sites. Over time, new visitors from search grew, and paying customers grew with them. The work that drove most of it took months to show up.

This isn’t a complete guide. Every business is different, and the details matter more than a checklist.

First, decide if this applies to you

Ask one question. Do you already have plenty of traffic?

If you do, your time is probably better spent improving conversion on the traffic you have.

If traffic is low and flat, you need to grow it. That’s what this is about.

Fix the basics before you spend anything

Before you invest in growth, make sure people can do what you want them to do.

It sounds obvious. But more than once I’ve found inquiry forms that didn’t work. In a couple of cases, customers couldn’t pay when they tried to.

Don’t assume it works because it worked for you once. Test it on different devices and browsers. You aren’t optimizing yet. You’re making sure it’s possible for everyone.

In this case, we also fixed technical problems on the site and made it easier to publish content.

Publish content that answers real questions

We had deep expertise in one area. It lived in long white papers that most customers would never read.

We also found questions customers were asking that nobody answered well. Some of those searches had low volume. We wrote the answers anyway. Small searches add up over time, and there’s less competition for them.

We built a backlog before we started publishing so we could keep a steady schedule. Once quality is in place, consistency matters most. Quality means a relevant topic and a thorough, credible answer. We started at three posts a week because we had enough material to keep it up.

The blog wasn’t the main thing. The brand’s core story lived on the main pages of the site, and every blog post linked back to them.

Partner with people who fit the brand

Next we added small creators. Their audiences ranged from a few hundred to about fifteen thousand followers.

We found them by searching the hashtags our customers used. We tracked each one in a spreadsheet with their profile, their engagement, and whether they had a personal website.

That last part mattered. We gave priority to creators with active websites, because a mention on a real site also brought a link back to ours. When I started, we had almost no links.

Fit came first. We read their content and watched how they treated their community before we reached out. We engaged with their posts for a while, then contacted them directly.

We mostly paid in product. Sometimes we added a small fee. We wanted them to actually use it, and we asked for honest feedback.

We lined up our publishing calendar with theirs, so their mentions and our new posts went out the same week.

Be patient

Search traffic grew, and revenue grew after it. The pages that grew fastest had been published at least six months earlier.

That’s the main lesson. The work you start today pays off later. If you wait until you need it, you’re already late.

What I’d add in 2026

The basics still hold. What changed is how people find answers. More of them now ask an AI tool instead of searching. Those tools lean on sources that answer clearly and that other trusted sites mention. So clear answers to real questions matter even more now.