How we built 10K+ monthly organic traffic in 5 months.

Summary

We believe that organic traffic is one of the best levers early-stage teams can have. We experimented our way to monthly organic traffic of over 10,000 unique language learners in under five months of operations. Recurring free traffic across multiple channels allowed us to iterate and experiment fast with a $0 marketing budget. Here is how we pulled it off.

Screenshots: Instagram, Google Analytics (Feb 2022), Google Search Console congratulating us on a milestone

Contents

• The notorious CAC and our quest for its reduction
• The advantages of being small
• Three channels we bet on (so far)
• blogging and SEO: the foundation of your organic strategy
• Social media
• Email marketing
• What’s next?
• Key takeaways

The notorious CAC and our quest for its reduction

When starting Heylama, I knew that there is a risk that customer acquisition costs (CAC) could reach the moon due to intense competition among language learning solutions online. Having worked on a few consumer projects and startups before, I have seen what unbalanced unit economics can do to a startup.

Although our business model doesn’t depend on having millions of users to achieve financial success (compared to pure app businesses), it’s still a big part of the risk related to future scaling.

To avoid entirely depending on Search and Social Media marketing from day 1, we decided to experiment and invest heavily in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email marketing, and social channels. Any organic traffic channel takes time to nurture, yet we had a few months to build our traction as we were pre-product.

We had three goals in mind:

1. to test our early prototypes and MVP without spending anything on marketing
2. to get a deeper understanding of how to capture the attention and hearts of our target segment
3. to instill confidence in future investors that we’ll find ways to tame the CAC

The advantages of being small

A German teacher collaborated with us on a project back in December and helped me with copy-writing now and then. It was her first experience working for a startup, and everything was novel.

I posted on Instagram one day, and my post had a tiny typo. While typos and mistakes in copy are embarrassing and must be avoided, I didn’t take down that post as the typo didn’t render that particular post useless. My colleague was flabbergasted and wanted an explanation.

I clarified that making mistakes is part of the process at an early stage. Moreover, we are in this unique period of the company’s lifecycle when charging ahead and making mistakes has more upside than downside in 99% of the cases. We’re just like beginner language learner who has a license to make mistakes. Besides, the never-ending flow of information makes people forget what they saw yesterday.

Armed with this mentality, we acted boldly and experimented with various marketing channels and messaging. We changed things almost daily and measured the impact. Our landing pages changed from week to week, our key channels shifted from month to month, and we learned. That’s the beauty of being small.

The three channels we bet on (so far)

In this post, I’ll write about only the three biggest marketing channels that we successfully harnessed in this short period. We’ll skip landing page experiments, Reddit, Quora, and a few other niche channels for now:

1. Blogging and SEO
2. Social media
3. Email marketing

Together they drive thousands of language learners to Heylama every month. We have retargeting pixels installed, which means that eventually, we’ll be able to reconnect with the readers and followers when we need it. The post might make it feel that these channels are independent and standalone, but they play and synergize together in reality. Here is how one of the scenarios could flow:

• We get thousands of views on social media.
• Thousands more find us via Google search.
• These language learners come to our landing pages or blog.
• They become our app users.
• Alternatively, they sign up for our newsletter or share their email if they want a PDF copy of the content.
• We can then bring them back to our blog when a new post is live or our product when new exciting features go live.

Blogging and SEO: the foundation of our organic strategy

Heylama blog screenshot

Our blog content is responsible for 60% of the 10–12K users we get every month.

Any startup founder I’ve mentored knows my obsession with content marketing. I’ve been evangelizing content marketing for years now. After looking at the rising customer acquisition costs across all channels, I’ve concluded long ago that content marketing isn’t just another channel for down the road. I came to believe that founders must start producing content, even pre-product. Content marketing shows if founders understand the problem space as your content won’t get any traffic if it doesn’t solve your readers’ problems. It’s also a long-term investment in your sustainable growth. It won’t get users for you overnight, but it balances the hefty fees that Google, Meta, and others charge you.

I learned that creating successful content for any audience is akin to product management. Best content solves readers’ problems:

1. the author must first understand who the reader is,
2. discover and pinpoint their pain points
3. find “the right solution” for them,
4. And then deliver it.

Delivering it also includes distribution. Posting an article and waiting for people to come is a failing strategy. One must drive traffic to it across channels to build momentum.

Content marketing shows if founders understand the problem space as your content won’t get any traffic if it doesn’t solve your readers’ problems.

Here are a few SEO and content creation principles we follow:

1. Own your blog: you can have your blog on Medium, especially your investor-targeting content, but the content you publish for your customers and users must be on the property you control 100%. You want to be able to integrate any tool, configure and design it as you like and finally own the traffic that you generate. Medium doesn’t let you do most of it.
2. Evergreen: publish content that’s not time-sensitive but has long-term value. For example, covering elections would be interesting only in the period leading up to the election day. However, political system analysis is something relevant at any moment.
3. Learn from today’s best: run a Google search for the keyword your want to target and closely review the top ten results. Produce content that solves the readers’ problems better, more creatively, or thoroughly.
4. Long format beats short format: more extensive and detailed posts tend to rank higher on Google and offer more value to the readers. Please don’t make it long for its sake; it must be to the point and relevant.
5. Freebies: readers love free stuff, and readers love to own what they like. Any listicle or resource I publish is available as a PDF download. You might think that no one would need a PDF version as the web version is right there, but you’d be surprised.
6. Cross-pollinate: always link and refer to existing blog content.
7. Post structure: provide clear headings and respect the hierarchy
8. Metadata is critical: every image must have alt-text, every page must have metadata, and posts must follow a predictable structure. Crawling robots are stupid, and we have to handhold them.
9. Blog structure: we must organize content meaningfully — clusters work best for search engines to understand your focus. You could think of clusters as thematic folders that contain all the posts that belong to that topic. It might seem trivial, but it’s not and takes a lot of thinking to organize your clusters in a semantically and practically effective way.
10. Distribution is vital: producing content without distributing it is a waste of time. Spend at least 50% of your content marketing efforts on distribution. I immediately re-share the post on FB and Instagram and answer a few Quora and Reddit questions.
11. Refresh existing content: it’s not always about writing new content. Refreshing past articles, adding more keywords, and updating the resources can be powerful strategies. Audit your content every six months.
12. Be data-driven: make sure you have the right analytics tools integrated. Search Console and Google Analytics is an excellent place to start. The next priority is FB and Google remarketing pixels (or LinkedIn pixel for B2B).

Social media

One of the posts on our German channel

Social media is harder to crack as established consumer channels such as Instagram and FB have limited organic growth in favor of paid ads. TikTok and LinkedIn remain channels that you can grow organically, but I didn’t have any bright ideas for TikTok, and LinkedIn is not the right channel for us for now.

Early experiments showed that Instagram has the highest traction out of all channels. So that’s where we focused. Types of posts:

1. useful vocabulary
2. humor
3. reposting bits of the blog content
4. promoting the tool through stories and posts

This strategy helped me grow the channel to 4.7K followers organically. Although data shows that Instagram sends only 20–30 visitors a month, I believe that a considerable chunk of the direct search that we can’t attribute to any specific channel comes from Instagram users who discover our content and then google us by name.

Principles we follow:

1. 80/20 rule: 80% of the posts must be helpful or fun content for the followers. Only 1 in 5 posts can be something you ask the user to do or promote your product or new blog post.
2. Follow the data: Instagram does give you tons of insights about your audience, including the time of the day your posts get most of the views, gender split, and how individual posts fare. Use that data to optimize
3. Consistency is essential: you want to stick to it regardless of your cadence. Pick a realistic rhythm. It could be once a week or ten times a week, but you’ll have to stick to it. Instagram is quite a dynamic channel, and ideally, you’d post something every day, but I knew that it’d be unreasonable for me given the time scarcity. I posted only twice and thrice a week on certain days of the week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and at a specific time of the day (15:00)
4. Leverage hashtags: different platforms have different rules regarding hashtags. Instagram likes many hashtags; Twitter does not so much. Know the best practice for your platform and follow it. Hashtags are essential for discoverability.
5. Experiment a lot: social media is a unique channel. It’s dynamic, emotional, and ephemeral. New content comes every second. Users gloss over content instead of pausing and reviewing it. To understand what resonates with your target audience, you have to experiment with the look & feel of your posts, typography, content type, content length, voice, and more.
6. Never buy likes and follows: some services boost your channel and grow followers for a fee. Please don’t do it. You want followers who want your content and who’ll engage with your content.

Email marketing

A screenshot of our email list

Some people mistakenly believe that email marketing is dead. That email marketing is only about spam and that no one opens emails from companies anymore. That’s far from the truth. And it all depends on your content.

No matter what channel you use, you should give value — something your users and readers would find relevant, exciting, and useful. If you stay focused on value, your recipients will read your emails. Emails that get ignored and newsletters that get ditched are those that push irrelevant, sales-y content.

We have over 3K subscribers by now and getting 100s more every week. It’s a great channel to connect with my readers and users, share updates and resources, or just say hi.

Here are the principles we follow:

1. Start collecting emails from day 1: don’t wait until your blog is popular and prominent to start collecting emails. Start collecting instantly. There are two sources of email addresses: a) new user signups once you have the product. Make sure you follow the data privacy rules. b) and resources downloads on your blog that require an email.
2. Only organic subscribers: never buy email addresses. Like with social media, you want real people interested in your content.
3. Respect their inbox: don’t send too many emails. Keep in mind that your product also sends transactional and welcome emails once they sign up.
4. Tie to your content: as your content is valuable to your users, share it with them via email.
5. Product updates: send product updates as well. Real ones, something solid and new, not just small UX improvements.

What’s next?

10–12K language learners a month is a great start, but it’s only the beginning. There are hundreds of millions of language learners worldwide, and we’ll have to grow way bigger. However, our experiments give us confidence that we understand our target audience and their pain points. So what’s next in our growth plans?

Once we enable monetization, we’ll also turn on performance marketing. There is no way around it, and our plan for our future marketing mix deserves a whole other post.

As for organic sources, there are various channels and cross-channel strategies we haven’t tried yet. My experience has shown that you should audit your marketing mix every 6 to 12 months to see how your target audience’s behavior changes and how your product’s evolution affects your distribution.

There are two strategies we’ll invest in next in addition to what we already do:

1. video
2. viral product loops (creating incentives for users to spread their love for Heylama and bring more users)

Let’s talk about the video first. I’ve already published a few videos on YouTube and have seen phenomenal traction for such low-quality improv content 😅. With a bit of effort and research, I predict that YouTube will quickly become our second most important source of language learner attention after SEO within six months.

As for the viral loops, we have some creative ideas for encouraging our users to spread their love for Heylama. On top of that, inspired by the success of Wordle, we have a few exciting language-learning-related games and game-like experiences that will bring even more people to Heylama.

Wordle is a simple word game that took the world by storm. We have similar learning-related games for language learners on our roadmap.

Key home takeaways

There is no way around investing in performance marketing and other paid strategies. That said, it’s the founders’ job to roll up their sleeves and be creative about finding an offsetting plan, especially in the company’s early days. Buying is easy, but buying isn’t always sustainable. Getting customers to come to your doorsteps of their own volition is hard, but it’s sustainable. I feel the truth is somewhere in the middle. I’ll share my learning in a few years.