How CardClan got its users
Comparison posts aimed at three named rivals, plus one landing page per occasion keyword, all pointing at a signup on the app subdomain.
Best guess. A working hypothesis. Useful to think with, not to repeat as fact.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- Authority that transfers to the product
- Backlinks that arrive without outreach
- Real expertise and a point of view
- 12 to 24 months of patience
- A writing budget, or a lot of your own time
Editorial SEO in 2026
The channel most damaged by AI answers. It still works if you bring data or an opinion, not a summary.
Everything on this channel →The play
5 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Pick the one incumbent your buyers already type into search (here it is Kudoboard) and publish a cluster around that single name: an alternative post, a cost comparison, a how-to guide, a 'what is X video' explainer and a 'X for business' review. Five of the seven posts on CardClan's blog page one do exactly this.
done whenThe five competitor-name pages start showing impressions on '[rival] alternative' and '[rival] pricing' queries in Search Console within 6 to 10 weeks.
- 2
Add two more named rivals and give each a permanent /you-vs-them page, then hard-link all three from the site footer so every page on the domain points at them. CardClan's footer carries a fixed 'Software Comparisons' block with vs-groupgreeting, vs-ellacard and vs-kudoboard.
done whenThe three vs pages are crawled and indexed within days of going live, because every page on the domain links to them.
- 3
Build the occasion and use-case keyword set as one page per term, not one page per theme: birthdays, christmas, teachers-day, halloween, farewell, onboarding, billing-due, meeting-reminder, customer-feedback. That set is 28 of the 55 URLs in their page sitemap.
done whenEach new keyword page picks up at least a handful of impressions on its own term inside a month, and your indexed page count rises roughly in step with the pages you ship.
- 4
Put actual product previews on those keyword pages before you scale the count. Their /design-categories/birthdays/ page promises '31 Designs' but shows zero card previews, only register and login buttons to a separate app subdomain, so a visitor who arrived on an occasion query has nothing to judge.
done whenYour best keyword page beats your site average on time on page and on click rate to the signup button.
- 5
Crawl your own sitemap before adding page 56. Their /cardclan-comparison/ is publicly live with lorem filler text and a comparison table naming Userpilot and UserGuiding, two products with nothing to do with greeting cards, and no blog post carries a date.
done whenA monthly crawl of your own sitemap returns zero pages with placeholder text, zero pages naming a product you do not compete with, and every post carrying a visible date.
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
55 URLs in page-sitemap.xml, 28 of them /design-categories/ keyword pages, three permanent vs-competitor pages linked from every footer, and a blog paginated to 15 pages. Sitemap index last modified 2025-12-17.
What else they ran
Nothing else identified. One channel carried it.
They ran the same play
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