Chapter 12: Life After Google Is Now: 9 Pieces of Advice on How a New Site Can Succeed Without Search

By Stephen Croome

Editor's Note: After producing print content for 170 years, Illustrated London News finally launched one of its print publications online—with Social, not Search. In this post, which was originally published on The Moz Blog on Nov. 8, 2011, Stephen Croome gives us the inside scoop on this groundbreaking strategy, which proved to be as successful as it was risky.

PODIUM is the magazine with “an intelligent view of sport” (http://www.thepodiummagazine.com). Our major articles are in-depth interviews with sports stars, our commentary is from globally renowned pundits, and we often do our own photo shoots. Cover stars so far have been Usain Bolt and Frankie Dettorri. Other articles have focused on golf, F1, the All Blacks, horse racing and the 2012 Olympics.

On the face of it, that sounds like an SEO's dream—rich, unique content that search engines love. It's a pity that it did not help us one little bit.

Was I going to get search engine traffic for “Usain Bolt” on a brand new website? Enough to beat his own website, his sponsor, Puma, the BBC, or The Guardian? Not a chance.

So I decided to abandon the un-loyal scraps of long-tail Search and design for Social instead.

This is the tale of what I did to grow online traffic for PODIUM Magazine when SEO wasn't a viable option.

What Does Designing For Social Mean?

 We had a clear strategy to leverage Social from Day One.

1. Only the Best Goes Online

I chose to put less content online. Only the best articles, and pieces that we thought would spark debate, made it online. This means that we didn't water down the user experience—readers only got the good stuff. Where Search would say, “Stick everything online and pray for long tail,” I believe the mantra for Social is, “Don't bore me. Blow me away!”

2. Twitter Is for the Insider's View

Twitter was owned by the Print Editor, Andy Tongue (@andytongue). This meant we got a highly knowledgeable sportswriter who is able to engage online with the people we cover. When you cover Usain Bolt and your writers are guys like F1's David Croft, getting them to retweet your coverage of them IS your Twitter strategy.

This is a virtuous circle of promotion; everybody taking part wins. Build this into your products, and you will have a marketing beast.

3. Facebook Is for Debate

For Facebook, we decided to pick the most contentious article in each edition and put it behind a “Like” wall on Facebook.

The article sits on the site's homepage, looking like an article; but when readers click on it, it takes them to the Facebook page. Our hope is that people will debate these articles on our Facebook page, thereby taking advantage of Facebook EdgeRank to make these articles pop up into everyone's feeds.

4. It's All One Product Concept = Better Use of Time and Energy

Using this strategy meant we could cut down our energy expenditure on trying to funnel people to each site. Instead of diluting our energy trying to get people to Facebook, Twitter, and the website, we focus on the website and allow the strategy and mechanisms built into our use of Twitter and Facebook to naturally gather users on those platforms. 

What We Learned

Here are the top lessons.

5. Do More of What Is Successful

By the time we got around to Version 2, we found that Twitter was a steady audience builder. We wanted to promote Twitter in the same way as Facebook. We didn't do that by slapping a Twitter button onto the webpage.

In the new design, we made Twitter and Facebook living parts of the website. Social is not an afterthought; the website is now a Social Content Delivery Mechanism.

6. Not Everything Succeeds

Facebook is hard for us, and we haven't cracked how to create the level of conversation we want there yet. This is partly due to the exciting rigors that come with turning print writers into digital writers. But each success that we do make, as measured by traffic spikes and new Twitter followers, builds a stronger internal business case to pursue this route with other titles.

7. Jump on Every Opportunity

This means monitor your analytics daily. You must turn every scrap of attention into engagement. To do this, you need to react quickly.

The Debate Piece

Take a look at the following graph. The first spike was a forum that had picked up our F1 piece, which certainly provoked some controversy.

I read their discussion and realized that I could add something to it, so I joined the forum and posted. This engagement kept the debate going and drove more traffic to the site, which means we can go back and promote other F1 stories in the future.

Author's Note: I posted openly and clearly as Podium, clarifying a point without appearing spammy.

The Wow! Piece

I saw this traffic spike in the analytics and tracked it back to the artist's Dribbble page (http://dribbble.com/WeaslyGrizzly). He had created a Pixorama for us to illustrate a story, and linked to us from his Dribbble account to say it was going to be in the magazine shortly.

This was not originally going to appear online. When I saw it and the traffic it was generating to our site from Dribbble, though, I knew it had to go on the site. I'm sure it is going to turn out to be awesome link bait. 

8. Partnerships = Win-Win

The partnership value comes in two forms. First, making connections with brands builds new relationships. We always try to make our first interaction with a brand be one that is helpful to them (retweet, brand mention, etc.), with nothing expected in return.

Second, as we write our own, exclusive content with major stars, we can share some of it with another website. They will send traffic to our site and link to us to read the full article. Sharing your unique content is something that would be hard to do if you had your SEO hat on, but in the Social world, it's fine.

As long as you have mechanisms set up to capture traffic to Facebook and Twitter, you are building long-term marketing channels. 

9. Tools Help

We learned what generated buzz and discussion, and we keep that in mind as we plan for the future. F1 has a crazy community!

Using a tool like Moz's Followerwonk (www.followerwonk.com) would be heresy to traditional print journalists as a means for deciding who is newsworthy, but it can now become part of our process in choosing who to cover, and who to talk to about when writing specific sports articles.

Followerwonk, by the way, allows you to see the most influential people in your Twitter network who have the keywords you specify in their bios.

In Conclusion

We still have a ton to do. But we have great, unique content at our disposal, and real subject matter experts to create our conversations.

Long term, I am sure (and relieved) that the traffic we have seen and the community we are building will be a much better investment for us than having devoted all our resources to pure SEO would have been.