Reached 250k users-Learn
to build your user base
Hey friends!
I’m super excited to share about this huge milestone on our website! Our transcription website Gglot.com now has 250k active users. The process was definitely not easy and the process of reaching this milestone was arduous. In this post, I’ll show you how you can do it too.
Here is our story.
Developing products is tough, especially for the online web. For example, a quick search on Google for “translation services” will now give you thousands of results. Just like any other startup company, we started with 0 sign up and built our own way up there. We have always seen marketing experts, software developers and start up professionals easily build their audience because of their credibility and expertise before they create a startup company. I know how hard it is to build an audience from scratch if you don’t know what you’re doing. But after finding my approach to create better content, get more exposure, better web design, and provide more value for our subscribers, our users and engagement skyrocketed. Several team members and I worked very hard to create a compelling home page for the site (including a live demo) that could spark some discussion. We also set up f5bot.com to monitor Reddit and other forums for keywords related to my project. Just in case I can jump into conversions and offer help.
What are we working on?
We are an auto translation & transcription tool helping bootstrapped entrepreneurs (or should I say solopreneurs lol) expand their websites into multiple languages and grab more market share globally. For your information, our site is built on WordPress which is a free blogging platform and it is powered by ConveyThis.com, our home-grown tool that lets thousands of people translate/localize their websites and stores.
Our purpose is to help entrepreneurs succeed. Our mission is to build the world’s most accurate machine translation solution. Our vision is to make website localization process uber easy with trust, transparency, innovation, efficiency, simplicity, and ease of use.
Overnight success takes years. Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint, a well-known financial management tool, once said, “When I started creating Mint, I took a very different approach. Validate your idea > create a prototype > build the right team > raise money. That’s the methodology I developed.”
Similarly, as Gglot continued to evolve, our team learned that to be successful, you first need to have a great product. The only way to build it is to get as many people as possible to try it first. So right now, we’re focusing on getting the next group of users on board and making sure everything is good enough for them, and then they’ll come back. The idea doesn’t matter, it’s the execution that matters. It’s really not surprising to have an idea, it’s all about executing that idea. Either you have a brilliant idea and you’re one of the only people in the world who can do it, or you have a brilliant idea and you have to be the best executor of that idea.
So, how did Gglot do it?
To build data-based growth marketing, we took a page from renowned entrepreneur Noah Kagan’s framework and used five steps to create a path to success.
• Set clear goals. Clear and measurable marketing goals are the most important part of any marketing strategy. From the very beginning of Gglot’s creation in 2020, we set several small goals based on our previous products (Doc Translator and Convey This).
• Set clear timelines and set a deadline for your goals. Choose a timeframe to track your goals. Without a timeline, there is no clarity. Any successful project needs to have a clear deadline, which somehow motivates the team to create. The project manager should be able to clearly understand if you are on or behind target at any given time. For example, to reach 100,000 users in 6 months. The goal Gglot set when improving the web design was to have the web design finished and released within a week.
• Research your product and actively analyze it to find the right platform for marketing. In this era of big data, there are countless social media platforms and very different target audiences. Gglot has opened Reddit, Twitter and Youtube accounts, and next plans to improve search engine optimization and place more ads on Google. Other popular marketing channels include: Apple search ads, influencer marketing and YouTube video ads. When you are figuring out where your customers spend their “free time”, you can meet them there.
• Design your advertising materials based on your product. For each media platform, the team needs to set clear goals. It’s important to have different marketing strategies and tactics for each platform, depending on the different characteristics of the audience viewing your posts. All channels are not the same and will not deliver the same results. For example, I need 50k subscribers from Youtube marketing in 6 months.
• Measure your progress. Measure and track the most important metrics. This is the most important thing you can do to ensure you are on track to achieve your goals. This is what separates growth marketing from all other types of marketing: it’s data driven. It’s an effective measurement tool, and doing so regularly allows you to measure and iterate to achieve your goals faster.
Search Engine Optimization
Not only that, you can also improve your website traffic through search engine optimization. If you rely on people finding you through Google searches, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be at the top of your priority list to generate leads for your business. Research shows that the top results on Google have a 33% chance of being clicked on. This means that if you are not number one on the page, you are missing out on a third of the potential traffic.
Improving your search engine optimization is a tricky business and sometimes requires you to play games with Google, which is like a professor who gives students points based on the keywords in their answers. This is when you may need to use a keyword strategy. Identify and target specific keyword phrases for each authoritative content page on your site. Considering how our users may search for a specific page using different search terms, Gglot has several keyword phrases such as audio translator, subtitle generator, translation service, video caption, transcribe video, etc. In order to rank multiple keyword phrases on our site, we created a tool page with a separate page for each keyword phrase that we positioned.
In terms of web content optimization, I recommend that you don’t forget to use bold, italic and other emphasis tags to highlight these keyword phrases in your web pages – but don’t overdo it. Also, update your content regularly. Regularly updated content is considered one of the best indicators of website relevance. Review your content on a set schedule (e.g. weekly or monthly), produce quality content and update it as needed.
Dwell time is another important factor that affects SEO. This relates to the amount of time people spend on your site each time they visit. If your site has fresh, exciting or newsworthy information, it will keep visitors on your pages longer and increase your dwell time. On Gglot’s blog, having additional content containing keyword phrases, this approach improves our search engine rankings. Our blog content includes short updates on specific topics such as how to transcribe videos, perform audio transcriptions, add subtitles and translations to videos, etc. Blogs are excellent tools for lead generation and can help you interact with your website visitors.
Today Gglot is:
• $252,000 in ARR
• Growing 10% MoM,
• 50+ website connectors: WordPress, Shopify, Wix, etc.
• 100,000,000+ translated words
• 350,000,000+ combined page views
This is the story of Gglot and I hope our story will inspire you in some way. Marketing is not just a fad that will soon be obsolete; quite the contrary, it is something your website needs to focus on now and in the future. Set your goals and monitor your results. It’s a marathon, a daily battle, and hard work pays off. You should always believe in your own product. And if you have any questions, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!