10 Lessons that I learnt from growing my site from 0 to 20 Mn Monthly Visits!
Hey Buddy - So you also fell for the tagline - just like 20 Mn people used to do every month while I was running my website - cultnuts.com.
We launched the website in May 2015 and we were already clocking 16 Mn monthly visits in July 2015 and we were ranking 81 in India as per Alexa . Numbers look too good to be true? Read on!
And BTW - we fell to 1-2 Mn Monthly visits after Dec 2015. It was a helluva ride and today you also get to ride it - even though only passively. So here it goes:
It was all going great at our startup “baggout.com” which I was running with my friend. We had cracked some SEO and were raking in a million visits a month on long tail keywords. However, we were not able to grow it further on SEO (because ranking on head keywords in ecommerce is TOUGH) and since our business model was affiliates - we were looking for more traffic sources.
The other channel which looked promising to us was Facebook and we were getting good traction on our Baggout FB page (even though it amounted to nothing since the traffic that we were able to drive off platform to our website was negligible - like 100-200 users a day).
Serendipity
We, however, were seeing that a lot of people were killing it on Facebook so we started collating a list of Facebook pages (would have collated 100+) and started sending messages to those Page Admins (all of them had at least 500K Page followers as a minimum criteria) - offering to pay them per post and in turn posting affiliate marketing links on their pages.
I sent messages to all of those page owners and some of them actually replied (very few though ~ 10). I discussed the proposition with them.
Proposition: I would pay Rs. X for posting every post on their page
One of the page Owners agreed and I started posting affiliate links for Mobile Phones on the page.
Lesson 1: You need to go really really deep in the weeds. You identify new niches - new opportunities - new ideas by working hard and not working smart.
Working smart helps only in capitalising on the identified opportunity but working hard helps you in identifying a new opportunity. As Paul Graham says - You need to do non-scalable things at first. Everybody in this world is trying to work smart so you cannot identify new opportunities just by working smart (unless you are really really lucky). But very few people are willing to work their butts off and there is little crowd on that side of the world.
And guess what - Every time we posted - we were generating much more in affiliate commission (compared to what we paid) but of course - we could not post more than 1 link every day otherwise it would have ruined the experience for the page followers which was a big priority for page owners and us.
So this went on for some months and then the page admin & I decided to meet. I was anyways, generally, mind boggled by the amount of activity on the Facebook page that I could see in the Page analytics. And was also seeing the traction various other links were getting on the page.
As a data nerd, I was calculating the hits that a link was getting from the page - there was a lot of variability but even the lowest performing links were getting 5K+ link clicks while the best ones were getting 100K+ hits. I saw clearly that a business can be built on this amounts of insane traffic.
We finally met in Rohini, Delhi and we definitely liked each other. We had an over 3 hour conversation in Adventure Island and I still remember one question that I asked - “You have so much traffic at your disposal so why don’t we start something on our own rather than sending traffic to third parties for a paltry sum”. And voila - we both agreed.
Lesson 2: Serendipity is undervalued. You, however, need to hustle hard to churn the reality into giving you positive ROI opportunities. As they say - luck happens when you have opportunity meeting preparation.
So thats how Cultuts (an acronym for Cultural Nuts) was born.
We met a few more times and finalised the plan. We needed to do a few things
Get the website up and running - Registered the domain - setup the website and servers (we used Rack space so that we never go down). We already had an inkling that it would be something big.
Get content team in place - We had to get some writers on board. I was the first writer and we got two interns.
Put monetisation in place - We already had an adsense account for Baggout so that was not a problem and we started with that.
So, we went ahead and got the website up and running. Got two writers + I was always there to write. And put monetisation in place.
Off to a great start
We launched the website and started pushing Cultnuts links on our Facebook pages and guess what - Zuck was willing to send a lot of traffic our way. The content selection was working awesome and we were able to publish any new trending topic onto our website within 15-20 minutes max. All these things combined - we started killing it. And we were doing it with 5-6 daily articles compared to others who were publishing 15-20 daily stories to achieve the same traffic. This meant that we were on the positive flywheel within FB’s algorithms. Every time, our link was getting strong CTR and good traffic - our page’s quality score was going up. Also, we were pushing money into Page Like campaigns to grow our audience like crazy.
Now, we set out to do two more things -
We wanted more traffic - There were three routes to the same on FB - we could start publishing more on our pages but that had an upper limit. So, we explored two more routes - we started reaching out to more FB pages and offered them deals on revenue per 1000 visits and we started running Facebook Ads.
Improve Monetisation - We had access to just three ads per page through adsense so we were already breaking any article into multiple pages. But, still there were more avenues for adding more ads. We reached out to Outbrain, Taboola and Revconent (all native content recommendation platforms - aka - pushing shady products and services with High CTR imagery) and finally added Revcontent to the platform since they were the fastest in their execution and helping us get it live ASAP.
LESSON 3 - In business, you need to respect the highest priorities of your client over everything else - even your processes or lack of processes.
If your client is losing money for every single day you are delaying then you better execute on the same day and help them take that money off the table. Think about them vs thinking about your processes. Tweak everything at your end to make sure that you are catering to your client’s North Star Metric and whatever they are struggling with. Revcontent was definitely shittier than others - But they made it work for us in the lowest amount of time. And guess what - they went live (even though we replaced them with Taboola later due to their highly questionable ads in banned niches).
Scaling to the next level
Reaching out to more FB pages - this was the best hack that we could have cracked. Essentially, we were doing 5-6 articles a day and then pushing them on our one page -whatever worked was being pushed to our other pages and we were sending it to other page admins who were pushing it on their pages. And we made it a point to pay them on time (every week) even though we were getting paid on a monthly cycle by Google. This helped us engender a lot of trust with Page admins and we were able to scale this side of the distribution fairly quickly.
Lesson 4: Trust is the most important aspect of any business operations so you need to give your vendors and customers every reason to trust you.
In addition, we were killing it on FB ads - we were getting the click for 5-10 p per click. We were testing aggressively and whatever link was getting lowest CPC was being scaled like crazy. We also noticed that whenever we were scaling ads by increasing the budget of an ad set from Min of Rs. 100 to Rs. X then FB was trying to spend that money quickly leading to higher CPC for first few days so we decided to never increase the budget for any ad set above Rs. 100. So what do we do if we want to spend Rs. 10K on an ad. We would, of course, run 100 copies of the ad @ Rs. 100 each.
Lesson 5: Working hard is so undervalued that sometimes people feel ashamed in accepting the same. But, at the end of the day - it is hard work all the way to the glory.
We figured out a bunch of other important things -
What kind of articles do well - The best format for us was “X Mistakes in Movie Y that you did not notice. Best performing article was - “10 mistakes in PK that you did not notice”
What placements do well - For us the ads on right side of the feed on Desktop were the killer
What is the arbitrage - We were able to get the traffic at XX p per click and were able to make more money through monetization on those pageviews.
But we did not know what we did not know.
The Mistakes
We were figuring out things on the job. We figured out traffic - then figured out adsense - then Revcontent - then more distribution. But we did not know that the best way to monetize is through Sponsored Branded content and we did not have any connects in corporates or ad agencies to sail through and this was going to become one of the reasons for starting our downfall.
Lesson 6: If you are not an expert in any industry and you are learning on the job - Great. However, always talk to multiple experts - it would be obvious to them - but for you - it would save many months/years of yours from going down the drain.
But, now coming back to our story. We were raking in hundreds of thousands of daily users by pushing viral stories on Facebook and the monetization was also in place. We were now looking to scale content side as well and started hiring more writers and started building a strong content team. It was not easy to attract good people to our not so posh office in Rajouri Garden, Delhi but we somehow managed to get some good writers in addition to the few interns that we had started with.
In terms of Technology - we had the same tenet as Zuck - our servers never go down and guess what - we used Rackspace servers which might be the most expensive servers on mother earth. We were spending 10% of our revenues on serving - and that too when we had a static website where in everything was being served from cache. Again - you dont know what you dont know.
Lesson 7 - Always AB test your biggest business variables or get some expert in. Else - you might be spending an invariabty high cost (eating your margins) without getting any commensurate benefits in return.
How does a downhill ride looks like
One day, when I logged into GA - I saw that the real time traffic was over 12000 - I thought some story might have gone viral and did not think about it. Checked back GA after a few hours - which was kind of a ritual for me those days. Traffic was still 10K-15K real time - I decided to dig deeper to find that bulk of the traffic was coming in from South Korea. Seemed like some influencer in Korea has shared our link leading to the deluge of traffic. But this traffic was just bouncing off from the website because Alas our website was in English.
But we were in shock of our life when 3-4 days later - our Taboola account was blocked and the reason given was that “we were sending in Bot traffic to Taboola Network” which their system might have concluded from the heavy bouncing traffic. Not only did they block us - they also withheld last two months of payment which was a sizeable sum. We reached out to our Taboola’s account manager and convinced him hard. After a few suspenseful days - our Taboola account was reinstated and we had a sigh of relief.
Our FB Ads account was also doing well. We were getting 10% CTRs on most of our scaled ads. But, we were living on the edge in terms of clickbaiting. More clickbaity - the article was - higher was the CTR - lower was CPC - and higher was the margin. We started getting some of our ads rejected but still majority of our ads were being run successfully. But the rejection ratio was increasing and we started getting fidgety. Because, it meant that our Ad account quality was reducing day by day. And then one day - suddenly - our ad account was blocked. We stopped getting any more traffic from our FB ads account. But, we still had our biggest source of traffic in tact. Which was our own facebook pages as well as the network of pages that we were working with.
The Sucker Punch
The traffic from our pages went out just like our FB ads traffic went. Seemed like our domain got low quality score leading to lower distribution and low absolute traffic. And just like that - our traffic went down from 1 Mn daily to 1 Mn per month and we were more or less out of business.
Lesson 8 - Never ever put all your eggs in one single distribution channel. That channel can just pull the rug from under your feet and you would die from the shock. Think: Zynga
The Journey as a whole
So, all in all, we made some good money in the business. But, we could have created long term media asset out of this experiment.
However, what we got from this is more than financial - I got a friend for life and learnt a lot.
Signing off for now! Lemme know what you think of the story. In case, you want any more details - would be happy to share.
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