InvestingDaily.com launched with an experienced publishing team and an internet marketing strategy comprised of legacy content from KCIInvesting.com
KCI Investing, a Division of Capitol Information Group, describes itself as providing “in-depth investment advice to help smart people achieve a secure and rewarding financial future.”
Indeed, it’s smart people helping smart people.
The company both markets and delivers that investment advice to self-directed investors online with an attractive and effective new website at InvestingDaily.
Phil Ash, Publisher, National Institute of Business Management, KCI Investing
As publisher Phil Ash explains it, KCIInvesting.com had existed since 2007, but without a comprehensive, content-driven search or internet marketing strategy behind it. When InvestingDaily.com was launched in March 2010, the Capitol Information Group’s previous websites, and their hypertext links, were redirected to the new URL.
While KCIInvesting.com had averaged 15,000 monthly unique visitors, the new InvestingDaily.com already averages 60,000 monthly uniques after only four months — a four-fold increase. The publisher’s goal is a half million uniques within two years and more than a million eventually.
That’s the power of an effective keyword strategy, search-engine-optimized rapid conversion landing pages, and free (but nevertheless valuable) downloadable reports, Phil explained. “The RCLPs are the key drivers of natural search traffic,” he said.
His editorial and production team is adding two or three free articles daily, one from the InvestingDaily.com branded ezine, “Stocks to Watch,” which is written by senior online editor Jim Fink. The other articles are republished from one of KCI’s seven or eight legacy ezines.
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The InvestingDaily.com team also concentrates on writing keyword-rich headlines and executing internal linking strategies as part of their overall internet marketing strategy, Phil said.
“Our intent when launching Stocks to Watch was to be timely and tap into current events for natural search benefits. So when the BP oil spill occurred, we wanted to be out there in the first few hours with a related article that was rich with the sorts of keyword terms that lots of people would be searching on,” Phil explained.
“Stocks to Watch is original content, produced daily, and written in an advertorial style, ideally developed around some news hook and then segueing into one of the paid services as the solution to a problem that Jim Fink has identified in that issue,” Phil said.
Jim, a talented and prolific online editor, also wrote five rapid conversion landing pages for free reports prior to launch and adds two new RCLPs each month.
The InvestingDaily.com site is experiencing an eight percent email sign-up rate. About 40 percent of these are a result of the interstitial pop-up ad that is run on the first two pages.
The site carries some display ads for its house products. Phil said he plans to explore monetizing InvestingDaily.com with third-party ads after conversions increase.
“We’ll tap into social media eventually,” he says. “We’ve seen some signs of life there, but we don’t feel it’s the best bang for our buck in terms of time at this point.”
“Our strategy is to use the website to build our email list and up-sell paid products, which include two legacy print newsletters. The remainder are all online services,” Phil said.
Capitol Information Group publishes eight free email newsletters and 12 premium investment newsletters. The publisher has embraced the strategy of reusing editorial content as part of its search engine optimization and marketing efforts.
“All of the paid content is embargoed and then released to the free website and unlocked one year after it’s published on the paid site,” Phil explained.
InvestingDaily.com is the company’s second website hub. It launched BusinessManagementDaily.com a year and a half ago, so it had experience that was valuable, both on the I.T. and the marketing side.
Phil hired Kevin Wallen, an industry veteran with extensive experience in paid and organic search, to be InvestingDaily.com’s online publisher. Franco Catanzaro, the site’s I.T. director, is Kevin’s collaborator and rounds out the team.
The challenges of migrating and redirecting nearly five thousand pages from the legacy KCIInvesting.com website were daunting. Each article page required a one-to-one redirect and a new URL configuration.
The company chose Interspire Website Publisher, the CMS of an Australia company that develops content management, shopping cart, knowledge management and email marketing software, which it says is used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Phil characterizes it as “a paid version of WordPress with some different functionality.”
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Don’t miss WordPress vs. Drupal vs. Telligent: Which CMS is Right for You?: Learn the pros and cons of each CMS with Aaron Campbell of Mequoda Group and Xavisys, T.J. Harty of Interweave and Doug Wade of Guideposts at the Mequoda Summit Boston 2010 September 15-17th, 2010.
