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Cyril Gupta

Is your primary traffic driver paid or organic?

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Hi founders! Marketing and traffic generation is hard and expensive. I am interested in finding out how everyone is approaching this problem. I do a mix of paid and free traffic. We run ads and also create a lot of content in multiple places. What's your primary driver? Which strategy is working best for you? Care to share?

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Austin Nguyen | Afforai
In terms of conversion rate, our organic traffic offers much better conversion. We haven't really invested a lot into our ads budget so both the scale and the conversion rate for that traffic are lower.
Cyril Gupta
@hungnguyenkhac7 That's great! What's the primary organic traffic source? Your blog?
Austin Nguyen | Afforai
@cyriljeet When we enter a user space, either in Vietnam or the US, we identify key social groups to establish a presence. Each market is different, in Vietnam, it is the Facebook community, while in the US it is LinkedIn and Twitter.
Also, what is your opinion on getting initial traction for a young startup? Is it ad campaigns or word of mouth marketing?
Cyril Gupta
@kaustumbh7 Word of mouth is so hard to get. It's very slow. If you have a budget, then I'd say definitely pay for ads.
@cyriljeet Got it. What would be a good budget to get your 1st 5,000 cutomers? Or does the CAC vary greatly depending on the industry?
Cyril Gupta
@kaustumbh7 1st 5000? Wow.. that's a big number. Do you mean trials? A lot depends on what you are selling and your price point
@cyriljeet I mean getting 1st 5,000 people to try your product. For an App it might mean downloads, for a website it might mean signups, etc.
Currently just focusing on orgainc traffic through- 1. SEO 2. Content Generation as Ads are very expensive!
Cyril Gupta
@kaustumbh7 That's amazing! Did you build an in house team for content? Want to share your blog?
@cyriljeet We don't have a content team as such. We use AI tools to write blogs on our shortlisted topics by giving them a detail description of what needs to be written including the major points, keywords we want to include for SEO, style of content, tone of writing basically, prompt engineer it and then tweak it and finally publish 🚀 For Twitter and LinkedIn we want our content to be more engaging, so we post about our product features, product performance, memes, trending topics in our domain and also some educational stuff.
@cyriljeet It does a decent job if you mention the correct keywords but I believe this is something search engines are actively working on and improving their algorithm to detect AI generated content. Since we are a bootstrapped company, it is how we are managing now.
Iren from FirstHR
It depends on the business stage.
Cyril Gupta
@iren_ivashchinenko What about your business?
Marilena Nikou
organic for now, but I am launching soon paid campaigns!
Oleg from FirstHR
Organic (SEO).
Cyril Gupta
@oleg_eltsov Amazing! Do you want to share your workflow?
Shaur ul Asar
Organic!
Cyril Gupta
@shaur_ul_asar That's fantastic! Is it from your personal blogs or social too?
Nick from FirstHR
50/50. I think a balance is needed.
Alex Petruchio
Organic is much better.
Cyril Gupta
@alex_petruchio Thanks for pitching in... Do you use organic more than Paid?
Dmitriy Pegov
30% paid, 70% organic.
Sergey Firkin
Mixed.
Cyril Gupta
@sergey_firkin What does the most work?
Apollon Latsoudis
Well it depends on the product or service I believe. If your offering requires personal demonstration and usp clarifications, then organic is the way to go. If your offering's proposition is crystal clear and solves a real problem, then perhaps paid traffic is the best way to proceed in order to build up your numbers
Adith Mathialagan
I have a similar experience to that of @hungnguyenkhac7, we haven't invested in any paid ad, major traffic is from organic sources to our blogs. And we also do a lot of landing pages optimised for conversions.
Cyril Gupta
@hungnguyenkhac7 @adith_168 That sounds really good! How many blogs do you have Adith?
Peyt Spencer Dewar
Organic. Haven’t tried paid as yet
Cyril Gupta
@psd Not tried at all? Why? If you are selling a service and it's converting... what prevents you from running ads?
Liam thompson
Oh Yess!!! Primary must be from organic source is what i believe
Neha
No Paid, all organic
Cyril Gupta
@neha_joshi8 That's amazing! Do you mind sharing your blog?
Drew "Sales Playbook Builder" Williams
Organic at the moment. Primary driver is content creation on LinkedIn and in-person workshops with Accelerators.
Cyril Gupta
@drewsalesplaybookbuilder That's amazing! I've started on LinkedIn a little while ago.. but growth is very slow.
Drew "Sales Playbook Builder" Williams
@cyriljeet yes, it takes time to curate an audience. But if you are curating the right audience, they will be with you for a long time!
Donald Evans
Definitely a mix for me. Organic traffic's awesome for long-term growth, SEO optimization is key here.
Frank Sondors
Cold email
Charlotte Chiang
Organic all the way! We've managed to grow a large community through WoM only - I believe it helps a lot that our startup has a strong mission behind it and we regularly engage with our community through chats, town halls, etc. We actually wrote a piece on why we don't pay for acquisition, based on some hard-won lessons from previous experiences in startup land: https://blog.anytype.io/why-we-d...
Cyril Gupta
@charmandro That's the most amazing thing! I've tried to grow a similar community on YouTube at https://youtube.com/@teknikforce It takes time, but it's worth it!