How to grow your Audience Online
The first session (after the keynote) for this morning is from Rebecca Weeks from Real Girls Media. She is clearly a tallented and professional lady with a strong background in advertising.
She started with a nice fundamental principle of New Media…
- Content leads to Traffic
- Traffic leads to Branding
- Branding leads to Monetization
Your current followers are your best and cheapest source of new readers. Find out who they are and what they like. Thank them. Ask them. Find out what other sites they visit and partner with them.
Interestingly, she is talking extensively about what I wrote about last week, namely Generation V. Good stuff. I agree.
She shared Hitwise information on which websites are the hot ones for social news sites. Yahoo Buzz is taking over Digg in terms of traffic. You need to be pre-approved to get into Yahoo Buzz. She got 500,000 visitors in about an hour by getting onto the home page of Yahoo. Of course, if your site crashes, you will never be invited back.
She spoke extensively about a site she works with called Divine Caroline. It was launced about a year and a half ago and competes with big powerhouses such as iVillage, Martha Stewart, & Glam.
Below are the results of her working partnerships and social marketing.
NOTE: All of her marketing techniques were free.
February 2007
- 100 daily unique visitors
- 1 advertiser
August 2008
- 2.4 million monthly unique visitors
- 25th largest women’s community on the web
- Users stay on the site for 5+ minutes
- Users visit 6 to 8 pages on average
- Advertisers pay over $15 CPM
- Chevrolet, conAgra Foods, Disney, Starbucks, Shutterfly, etc all advertise.
- 219 partners
Important points from some other sites:
- Befriend the people you admire online.
- Research the success stories and the advice from influential leaders on the Internet.
- Create weekly round-ups of what others are saying. The other bloggers will note the referrals.
- Reach out to other blogs and websites that you can partner with. Simply email or call them.
- She partnered with other successful online players in her field as “advisors”. They provided insight in exchange for being mentioned in the About Us section of the site. No cost.
The best part was the final question. Someone asked how she got such an incredible looking site with so many features. She mentioned that she started with excellent connections in the advertising world. She also had a connection with a tallented and professional programming team.
She also admitted to having funding. How much? 6 million!
Popularity: 39% [?]
