What is Scrimba? #

Scrimba (YC S20) is a coding course platform with over 120K monthly active students. It's based on a new video format that makes the screencasts fully interactive for students, and easier to create for teachers.

What is the Scrimba blog? #

The Scrimba blog publishes guidance on how to learn to code and get hired as a Junior web developer.

In my role as Content Lead, I launched the blog in June 2022. In the 8 months since, we have published more than 70 best-in-class posts and rank highly for keywords impactful to Scrimba's business. In January 2023, organic traffic grew +80% MoM compared to December 2022.

Key accomplishments & responsibilities #

I started the Scrimba blog from scratch in 2022. Here are my key accomplishments to date,

• 🏆 Hired and enabled a team of talented and motivated SEO writers who are also technical
• 🏆 Oversaw the publication of 70 SEO optimised posts, enriched with custom illustrations, embedded YouTube videos, and interactive code examples
• 🏆 Attained top-ranking positions for keywords highly relevant to Scrimba's business. Increased organic traffic 80% MoM
• 🏆 Developed a content repurposing playbook to repupose long-form posts for social media. Increase traffic to the blog from social by X%
• 🏆 Collaborated with the design team to establish a distinct and eye-catching brand identity for the Scrimba blog. Adapted a template and launched the SEO-optimised blog

In my role as Content Lead, it's my responsibility to:

• Plan the strategic direction of our content efforts to reach thousands of learner developers a month through organic evergreen content
• Write posts
• Edit posts
• Critically and effectively analyse the scope and potential business impact of new posts
• Monitor and measure key metrics and evaluate how content is performing, refreshing content when necessary
• Syndicate every bit of content on industry-leading publications like Hashnode and dev.to
• Carry out technical SEO improvements based on industry trends and updates from Google
• Hire, coordinate, and support freelance SEO writers who are also technical. Prooread, edit, and suggest improvements to their work

The business problem #

When I joined Scrimba as employee #2 in 2020, in typical startup fashion, I wore multiple hats, including "Community Manager" before bring promoted to Content Lead.

As I helped students, I heard the same questions again and again (and again!):

• What programming language should I learn first?
• How long will it take?
• Should I learn React?
• (More recently) Will AI like ChatGPT make programming redundant?!?

Rather than answer every question one on one, I identified Scrimba's unfair advantage:

It started with me researching and writing my own posts. Over time, I bought on freelance writers.

8 months later, we are now ranking for some high-value keywords and climbing at a good pace!

To understand my approach to content strategy, here are the 4 broad steps I took with Scrimba.

1. Identify topic clusters impactful for the business
2. Create high-caliber and engaging content
3. On-page technical SEO optimization
4. Refresh content as necessary

This page is dedicated to the high-level achievements, but you can read more about How I launched a brand new blog to 80,000 monthly organic visits in 8 months on my marketing blog.

Tools I used #

• Google Analytics
• Ahrefs Keyword research
• Answer the Public Keyword research
• Ghost CRM
• Google Sheets Keyword research

Related reading #

• How I launched a brand new blog to 80,000 monthly organic visits in 8 months
• Cutomise Ghost without any CSS
• What I know about hiring freelance writers
• 8 surprising features of Ahrefs