How I made our company's website top#14 growing in the publishing industry (Oct) | Hacker News Reader

How I made our company's website top#14 growing in the publishing industry (Oct)

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How I made our company's website top#14 growing in the publishing industry (Oct 2013). I was hired as the marketing manager at an online publishing company to make the website more visible (SEO) and with more Unique Visitors. My education: MBA My experience: 9 years in Management (5 yrs in Marketing and Marketing Analysis) Obviously, if you want to get consistent real visitors, it will take some time. Even if you get lucky to be in the top list of Hacker News or Reddit or... for a while, it is still a temporary improvement which won't do any good for a company. On the other hand, all the partners at the company were considering to enter a new market since their investment were almost gone! So I had no money to spend (on ads or promotions), no time to incrementally implement some basic steps, and no support from other websites to help us. First, I made a mistake!! I spent 10$ for a Gag (fiverr) to get more semi-real visitors out of my own pocket, knowing that it might buy me some time to implement more long-term strategies. It turned out that one of our sponsors that had access to our Google Analytics has found out about it and left us in 1 week. Also, the gag didn't really change any important metrics on our website. Then, I did this in summary:

(1) I cleaned the website from minor and major issues like deleting links that were not working properly, deleting any plugin that was too much for our readers, used simple URLs for each article, set up all SEO metrics including Focus keywords and SEO description (even alt. description for pictures) even for articles from 6 months ago. (2) Asked all our 60 authors to use their Google Plus ID in our profiles and change their Google Plus profile under "contributor" section to get Google Authorship for all of them (which only 30% of them did that) (3) Did an overall analysis everyday to get Trending Topics from Google Trends and also alternative words for each hot topic and asked the Content Manager to replace some words from the published contents based on my daily analysis.

(4) Did a competitor analysis every week to find market benchmarks and check if any growth in our number of visitors was caused by the Market itself. This segmentation helped us to know which article is "really" getting more traffic because of its content. (which the #1 article by this analysis turned out to be about Bitcoins, just FYI) Then we asked our authors who wrote those top articles to continue their topics...

(5) Based on the Competitive Analysis every week, I emailed several websites (mostly startups) to partner with us (I only emailed companies with our range of Alexa Web Ranking) with a customized email and a unique strategy with each one of them. (with each analysis, I found out what they are looking for and how we can help them). Then started to set up win-win contracts (informal) with them that was basically going to help us both grow our business. In 3 months, I found about 20 Partners. (6) Asked all partners to use BackLinks and also favorite our tweets or even retweet them to their own audience. Also asked them to write for us as a guest writer and promote their own articles via our website. In return, we would publish them and promote them ourselves. (7) using proper @s for our Twitter Audience and potential followers to personally suggest them some articles. Some times without even including any weblink to get their attention that we are not spams. (8) Responded to any interaction in all our Social Media account the moment they appeared in my notification bar. Except for 5-6 hours per day that I was sleeping. And this is my achievements: - Alexa Ranking improved 310% in the first month. (United States rankings) - We appeared in the 2nd page in Google Search Engine for our 3 focus keywords after 2 months (we were not even in the first 5 pages) - Our Klout score went up from 40 to 60 - We got 400 real followers in twitter in 2 months which their response rate is 10%. (The other 1600 followers that has followed us before I joined have a response rate of 0.4%. - we got 20 partners and backlinks everyday - we got 2 new sponsors - .... We got Microsoft and SAP as our partner!! (MS VCs) And now people who knew I was responsible for this are asking me to work for them!

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