Embarque.io

Featured snippet!

First win of 2021! Ranking in the featured snippet for a keyword that gets 17k searches every month! Here's a Twitter thread on how we got to this ranking.

Featured snippet!

First win of 2021! Ranking in the featured snippet for a keyword that gets 17k searches every month! Here's a Twitter thread on how we got to this ranking.

...and $400 away from a 6 figure annual revenue for Embarque.io😬. Super cool.

Finishing 2020 with a nice milestone: we've exactly published 150 articles. Pleasantly surprised it's a rounded figure haha.

Best practices along the way

Content

• Word count matters — for both SEO articles and landing pages. Invariably, our content with 1000 words or more rank significantly faster.
• Use a topic optimisation tool, like Frase, cognitiveSEO, or Clearscope. They work, and help reduce the indexing wait from months to weeks.
• Keyword optimisation for SEO works. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
• Our average word count per content asset is above 1000.

Building Embarque

• Package upgrades still consist a huge part of our growth. Nice.
• Community engagement matters. I’ve recently realised this: I’ve gotten all my clients through community engagement (for another blog post)
• Even those that I’ve acquired through a “sales” call have found me through a forum post, or in a Slack group, and so on.
• The jump from being a content creator to an agency founder feels much more emotional than I thought it would.
• Delegate. If you think that you can do the job faster/better by yourself, you’re most likely wrong.
• Prioritize providing the best customer experience that you can — but not at the expense of customer acquisition
• Some prospects are just not for you — and that’s OK. Learn to fire clients.
• Sometimes, our growth never feels enough. I realise that this is going to be a recurring feeling.

We've been at this for around 6 months now, and it still feels like we're in our very early stages.

Onwards and upwards to 2021!!!

📈High-quality content for SEO, product and community building is what we strive to create.

Focusing on quality and customer happiness have been important factors for our growth.

I’m super stoked to finally release this content samples page, which contains articles that have helped brands to grow their audience and get new clients through SEO.

When it comes to measuring outcomes, we purely rely on 2 important elements that contribute to meaningful SEO-fuelled growth:

1. Organic search traffic (i.e. the content ranking in the top 10 for high-volume keywords AND getting actual traffic)
2. Conversions

In my opinion, other “success” metrics for SEO content can be quite deceitful to clients. But hey 😬.

Guide to the samples page: https://embarque.io/blog/creative-content-writing-samples

Samples page: https://embarque.io/#samples

Yaaaaay!

Until today, I was earning $13-14K per month since Feb 2020 from my full-time job and freelancing as a marketing strategist.

Yesterday, I submitted my final freelancing project.

Today, I'll be working full-time on Embarque, an agency for productized SEO content marketing services that earns $6k in monthly revenue (http://embarque.io/).

Salary cut: temporary

Building something that I love and own: priceless

I've never felt so sure of my decision.

May - August (3 months) - Reached $3,500 MR
August - September (2.5 weeks) - $6,000 MR

It took me 3 months to reach $3,500 and 2.5 weeks to get to $6,000

Mostly from upgrades. Thank you so much for all your support. My clients are the real MVP. :D

http://embarque.io/

...And I've shared all my learnings in an interview about building Embarque and having a full-time job at the same time.

We talked about:

• Why product excellence should be every indie hacker's #1 priority for growth
• What product-based growth means for productised SEO content marketing services
• Growth through customer success and guest-posting
• Almost giving up 2 months in

https://www.indieldn.com/post/how-julian-canlas-built-a-content-creation-productised-service-embarque-io-to-3-500-mrr