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How Can Attraction (A) Be Improved?
What you’ll learn:
Without an audience, your subscription website is essentially invisible. To grow and profit online, a multiplatform publisher must have a website that drives traffic, builds relationships, and sells subscription and information products. Learn how to develop an efficient audience development strategy – one that enables you to build a better website in less time, and for less money.
Hosts:
- Don Nicholas, Founder, Chairman & CEO
- Kim Mateus, EVP & Client Success Group Leader
- Bill Dugan, SVP & Client Success Group Leader
Time: 4 minutes, 0 seconds
Related resources:
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Transcription:
Doing business on the internet is a lot like a shopping mall. And in the great shopping mall of the internet if your shop is in the basement of the shopping mall and the stairs down to your shop are locked, the door is locked, then you might as well go out of business because you’re not gonna get any traffic to your store, you’re not gonna get any business. It’s the same thing on the internet. If your keyword phrases can’t be found by your organic searchers because they’re on pages 10, 20, 30, then you might as well have that shop in the basement of a shopping mall with the door locked.
The attraction metric is really all about managing the content on your website to make sure that you’re as visible as possible in the search engines. And that really means the search engines and social is what you’re working with. In the last three to five years we stumbled upon a process we now call blockbuster management. So this blockbuster management program acknowledges that any given website over time might have thousands maybe tens of thousands of posts, but the remarkable thing is a relatively small number, 200, 300, 500 will probably ultimately be capable of driving 80% of the traffic from searching social. So blockbuster management acknowledges this kind of bestseller phenomenon, like a book publisher’s backlist of evergreen titles. And we play to it now.
We identify the blockbusters, we monitor their success and where they’re ranking and how much traffic they’re driving and how many new subscriber sign-ups we’re getting from that program. We look at the structure for the blockbusters that are working properly and we try to structure new blockbusters, and then we very carefully manage the mix. For a new website that we’re launching on any given day, 80% of the content might be new and 20% might be blockbusters. As the website matures and the blockbuster list becomes more and more productive over time, those numbers can flip around, and as much as 80% of the traffic, actually, we have websites now that as much as 90% of the traffic is coming from their blockbusters. And the mistake that most publishers make here, is they put up too much new content and conversely they don’t spend enough time managing the blockbusters, updating them, republishing them, and re-promoting them. We recently had a website that we were able to take from about a 27% visibility up to about a 36% visibility. It’s like a 35% increase over a period of 6 months just by being more disciplined about following the blockbuster protocols.
The biggest thing with attract is to be disciplined and to find editors who almost have a little bit of a competitive streak. So editors historically have been able to write about what they wanna write about. And online, of course, we can’t just do that, we have to first understand what it is our markets are searching for, and then we have to write content to meet that need. And for an editor to be willing to sort of play the game, to look at the numbers, look at the metrics and say, “Okay, this is what I need to do to improve this post to make it more findable.” You almost want someone with a little bit of a competitive streak because they wanna outdo themselves, they wanna keep getting better. They wanna know that their content is ending up on a blockbuster list, and it’s responsible for driving X% of traffic in any given month. So it’s really about discipline and it’s about finding the right people because not everybody’s cut out for it. Not everybody wants to do it, they just wanna write and that’s it, and you kinda need somebody who wants to write to be found and is okay with being measured and kinda likes it.
