I Turned My Love For Quotes Into A Social Media Website That Gets Over 200K Visitors/Month

Published: April 26th, 2022
Siddharth Malhotra
Founder, Our captions
$1K
revenue/mo
1
Founders
3
Employees
Our captions
from Delhi, India
started January 2019
$1,000
revenue/mo
1
Founders
3
Employees
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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello, my name is Siddharth Malhotra, and I am the founder of OurCaptions.

Our Captions is a social media website where you will find every type of caption for Instagram and other social media platforms. Our website is updated regularly. Captions are mainly created for youth, covering trending topics and major current affairs.

Presently, we are having approx 200k visitors per month to our website.

our-captions

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

During my childhood, my father used to tell me interesting quotes. He used to explain the meaning of each quote. Gradually it generated lots of interest in me. I used to always look for interesting quotes in various newspapers, magazines, etc. I used to compile them in my diary and used to share them with my friends. They used to appreciate it, which encouraged me to start writing quotes.

Initially, I started with basic and simple quotes. Subsequently, with encouragement from my parents and friends, I picked up this talent and started writing quotes for my school magazine.

During my college days, I had an interest in coding, which led me to be admitted to the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT). It was a 2-year course. During this course, I realized website designing was very appealing to me. I gained proficiency in website designing.

Once I was supposed to design a website on affiliate marketing. I researched a lot and saw a couple of videos on it. I was convinced by the process of how affiliate marketing worked. I immediately started researching everything that was needed to enter into affiliate marketing.

Eventually, I made an Amazon affiliate site on mobiles. However, I later realized that it was quite a big project. Accordingly, I decided to design a website on captions by the name bestinstagramstatus.com.

I created a few articles with the latest trends and published them on my website. Later on, I did not find the name “bestinstagramstatus.com” much appealing to me. So I decided to change the name of our website.

In my view, captions mean someone’s thoughts regarding a picture or a situation, and my main goal was to put everyone’s thoughts in one place in the form of captions. Eventually, I came up with the name OurCaptions. Subsequently, I built up a team of experienced content writers.

So far, we have been able to publish more than one hundred articles on our site, which consists of diverse topics for captions. We have even added our new line of Instagram marketing, where we guide people to grow their Instagram accounts. Although this niche is very competitive, with lots of hard work, we have been able to achieve most of our articles as top-ranked on Google.

Take us through the process of designing your first website.

It has been a very challenging journey so far. With no experience in article writing, we started our journey with very basic quotes. With lots of hard work, we managed to publish 20 articles but did not get any sizable traffic for a long time. We were disheartened and started looking for a solution to this problem. However, we did not give up and kept publishing articles regularly.

Gradually, we found that our site was being visited regularly by large numbers. Today most of our articles are top-ranked, as mentioned earlier. The best part about the numbers is that 90% of the traffic comes from organic searches. The secret behind this achievement is “Just be consistent in posting your articles and make sure your articles are properly optimized according to search engines.” I can guarantee you that after a few months, you will surely see the results.

Describe the process of launching the website.

Without any help except YouTube videos, we managed to launch our site in 2019. From launching a website on WordPress without any knowledge to attracting more than 200K monthly visitors, the process and journey have always been and still are tough enough.

It took around 6 to 7 months to make our first article - Car Instagram Captions, to the top page of Google. We were on the 9th cloud when we saw this. I was proud of not only getting one of my articles to bag the first position on Google but also because everything was self-made without any help.

After the first article got ranked, then there was no stopping by. After a few days, almost all of my articles started to rank on the first page. We did not spend a single penny on marketing our website. Everything was and is truly ORGANIC!

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain visitors?

We realized that all content must be unique and original. We ensured that our articles were in keeping with the latest trends, upcoming festivals, and major ongoing events. We have always tried to cover very basic topics such as coffee, chocolate, cars, etc.

We kept only two things in mind: being consistent and optimizing our articles properly according to the search engine. To write proper SEO-friendly articles, one thing should be taken care of - “choose your keyword that has maximum search volume and low competition. Also, the keywords in articles must be used optimally.”

Although our maximum traffic is from organic search, we still promote our website on social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. We did not do any type of ads. Everything was basic and organic. “If your content quality is good and the readers are staying on your site, then in no time, you’ll see amazing results.”

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today, I am happy with my performance as we can see our metrics are going upward, which means people are showing keen interest in our articles. We have more than 200k global visitors monthly and more than 10k email subscribers. We started being regular on social media just a few months back, so our social media metrics look like this - Facebook has more than 1000 followers, who are very few as of now, but we are planning to grow it asap. Pinterest is booming, we are getting more than 1 million views monthly.

Be patient and original. Eventually, your hard work will pay off, and no one can stop you to reach the heights you want.

So in all, presently, we are doing quite well, but as we say, there is a scope for improvement at every step. We are working on publishing more diverse content in the future, which will include quotes by famous personalities, Hindi content for all our Indian audiences, and proper guides and tips for growing your Instagram account.

Our main aim is to deliver as many captions/quotes to our visitors. We want to be the biggest hub of captions in the internet world. People must get each type of caption they think of on our site! Whenever people think of any caption, the first name that comes to their minds must be our captions, and our site must have that article! So obviously, there is no stopping publishing any type of captions.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Since the day I started my business, I have learned mainly two things. Firstly, in a business, one has to be very patient as there are likely to be many hurdles initially. It takes time for a business to gain stability.

Secondly, one should try to learn maximum from each possible source. The knowledge thus gained must be invested back in business to see the desirable results.

Although the advice from senior professionals is always helpful, try to evolve your strategy to run the business due to ever-changing technological advancement and human behavior.

Also, I would like to share the biggest decision I made at the beginning of my journey.

During the initial days of our business, I was told that to rank my articles on Google, I would have to create backlinks on our site. But according to my logic, if this was the fact, then no beginners could survive in the blogging field because creating even one backlink was very expensive for me.

So as there was no financial support, I decided to remain strict towards publishing only genuine and original articles. People should not find any of my captions on any other sites. I trusted my work, skills, and content, which resulted in getting top-ranked on Google without creating a single backlink till now (paid or unpaid).

All the backlinks that we can see are organically created. Today, I am proud that because of this decision, I could break one of the biggest myths about blogging.

So, this whole situation made me learn to always trust your work and content. Be patient and original. Eventually, your hard work will pay off, and no one can stop you to reach the heights you want.

Also, from the first article of caption till now, all the captions are written only by me. I do not delegate this work to any of my content writers. Because it was me who started to write such captions, and I only believe in my sense of writing such captions. With god’s grace, I will continue to write all captions and quotes for our site in the future too!

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Initially, we started our blogging journey on Blogger. But later on, we learned about WordPress, and still, we are on it.

We use Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, and Twitter to promote our content. We are very much regular on these social media platforms. These platforms play a very crucial role in boosting your site.

For email marketing, we have been using Mailchimpfor quite a long time.

Also, WordPress itself is a self-sufficient platform. We use all the common plugins that are provided by WordPress.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

In the field of blogging and digital marketing as a whole, reading books and updating your knowledge are very important.

Articles on “neilpatel.com” by Neil Patel and “shoutmeoutloud.com” by Harsh Agarwal have been my constant guide in the blogging industry. Every blogger is very much aware of them. They guide us about blogging uniquely and have great writing skills to influence even a non-blogger!

To develop my mind in business, my most influential book is - Connect The Dots By Rashmi Bansal. She is an Indian author. In this book, she has written 20 inspiring stories of 20 successful entrepreneurs who, without an MBA degree, dared to find their path. Every story has made me learn different life and business skills.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

  1. Always focus on original and unique content. Apart from a successful business, it also gives a sense of pride and confidence in oneself.
  2. Although the advice from senior professionals is always helpful, try to evolve your strategy to run the business due to ever-changing technological advancements and human behavior.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!