How to grow your startup by building a newsletter audience

Moneycontrol is a simple financial and business portal that hosts a ton of information on individual public companies, global and Indian indices, business news articles, personal finance and more!

Moneycontrol's SEO numbers
- Traffic ⇒ 62M+
- Keywords ⇒ 3.8M
- Backlinks ⇒ 35.2M

Top Subfolders:
- /india/stockpricequote ⇒ 32.6M traffic
- /news ⇒ 7M traffic
So, majority of Moneycontrol's traffic comes from their "stockpricequote" pages.

Now, these 'stockpricequote' pages are essentially part of a stocks directory.
Each stock in the directory has it's own individual page. For example, there is dedicated page for Asian Paints, ONGC, HDFC bank and more!

Now, on the ONGC page there are many sections like
- ONGC share price
- SWOT analysis
- Stock Overview
- Advanced chart

This page also links to ONGC's financials page that includes their annual and quarterly balance sheet and profit and loss numbers.
Collectively these pages rank for high volume keywords like "ONGC share price", "ONGC revenue", "ONGC swot analysis" and more!

Since these pages primarily include general company data, many other reputed websites on the net link to them. For example, ONGC's Wikipedia page links to their Moneycontrol financials page.
So, with these pages they not only get high traffic but also links - so it's a win-win situation!

Not all sections under these "stockpricequote" pages are available for free to a user. Moneycontrol hides part of the data under a CTA, so serious traders would be encouraged to buy their pro plan.
Apart from this, they also run ads on their platform which brings part of their revenue!

Amazon's ads business has done tremendously well. Now following suit, Walmart is also aiming for a bigger piece of ad revenue. In 2021, Walmart made ~1.5bn surpassing Twitter & Snapchat and doubling its ad business vs 2020.

But the winds are changing in the digital ads market as more & more people are moving towards privacy.

Now with Apple’s privacy policy change, 62% users have opted out of tracking which cost $10bn in revenue for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter & Snapchat in just 6 months 🤯

This works in favour of Amazon and Walmart. All of the data that Amazon & Walmart collect when you shop on their website is completely owned by them. So no privacy change will ever take the data away from these companies.

The data these companies "own" has just become more valuable for ads! So now any company that attracts you to their website and collects your data has the potential to be an ad network.

Ultimately, everything is becoming an advertising network.

Breweriesnearby.com is a programmatic SEO website built by Ian Ruta.

Ian is really passionate about breweries.

So, considering the high SEO potential of brewery keywords, he decided to buildd a directory for craft breweries using NoCode tools.

Programmatic SEO is a way to create 1000s of pages based on an underlying database.

Here are the different parts of Breweriesnearby that together make a programmatic SEO website:
a) Content
b) SEO potential
c) Database
d) Automated Pages

But, why go the NoCode way?

Problem:
- Generating SEO traffic is NOT straightforward
- It requires rapid experimentation
- Time and cost of hiring a dev team made the project risky ➝ in-front cost
- Plus there was bound to be recurring dev cost ➝ multiple iterations

Solution:
- With NoCode, Ian built the MVP and version 1 at fraction of the cost and time
- The project was built with less complexity - as there was no need to communicate and align with a team.
- Plus he could experiment and iterate quickly based on user feedback

NoCode Tech Stack

1. Webflow ⇒ pages are automatically created from Webflow's CMS data and templates. It has in-built technical SEO capabilities and provides design flexibility
2. Airtable ⇒ is the main database that stores all the content we discussed earlier.
3. Whalesync ⇒ syncs data from Airtable to Webflow's CMS. This is a faster more user-friendly syncing alternative to Zapier.

4. Jetboost ⇒ NoCode Webflow tool that adds features like search, pagination, and filtering to your website.
5. Octoparse ⇒ Octoparse is a free scraper tool that gathers data from brewery directories and structures them into spreadsheets that are pasted into the Airtable database.
6. SEMRush ⇒ SEO tool that helps identify low-competition, high-volume long-tail keywords surrounding breweries.

Final impact

A) Cost
- Webflow + Airtable + WhaleSync + Octoparse + SEMRush ⇒ $50/month
- Opposed to the $3k for a dev team

B) Time
- MVP ➝ 1 week
- Version 1 ➝ 3 more weeks

C) Metrics
- 30,000 organic impressions
- 1000 organic clicks
- 1000 pages live
The site was launched in July 2022, so their numbers are steadily increasing.

But, regardless, you cannot discount the fact that Ian was able to buildd a complex product affordably in just one month with NoCode.

💡 Lessons:

1) Learn NoCode by doing
2) When stuck, visit online NoCode communities
3) Learn the scope and limitations of the tools you use before you start building

4) It’s important to still maintain lean principles as well, even if NoCode is already a lean approach.
5) And, as and when you buildd the product, try to validate as much of it as possible at different stages before committing too much of your time.