Wow. This site went from 2k to 18million uniques per month....

[JasonD]

... Click here to find out how.

http://www.movoto.com/blog/movoto-com/buzzfeed-for-real-estate/

It's a pretty good read actually but the TL;DR version is they studied what the big viral boys do, copied, refined and shared pretty much everything

[ergophobe]

Thanks! Many nuggets in there and well worth reading in entirety.

Their approach is so quaintly old-fashioned, like something that would work for a PR firm in the pre-internet days. Figure out what your audience wants, find out who shares content with your audience (a somewhat easier job pre-internet), work the phones to place the article. What is the world coming to when hard work and strategy win over cheap tricks?

One thing that jumps out is how many resources they threw at this and how patient they were. I think a lot of places pay lip service to developing content, but they don't have a multi-person team tasked with doing that for two years grinding away until they hit the takeoff point.

So, you're probably thinking, as a real estate site, it's pretty obvious we should be writing about video games.

Frankly, no, I'm not. Or I wasn't. But I'm rethinking that now.

Eventually, we realized even video game characters need a place to live and are from somewhere.

And this helps with the HIPPO problem too:

Our brainstorming sessions aren't of the typical "person in the front of the room writing down ideas on a board" variety. ... I might be afraid to voice a "bad" idea. Instead, we brainstorm separately, but together, on the same Google doc where everyone is anonymous.

Brilliant.

What we've found is that virality basically boils down to a equation comprised of two numbers: click-through rate and share rate.

we spent months studying what exactly generates the "curiosity gap"... Perfecting it... was absolutely key to increasing our average click-through rate

The other absolutely vital piece of the CTR puzzle is image choice. How vital? We've spent nearly a year testing and learning what makes a image as clickable as possible on Facebook—and we're still at it.
After all that trial and error, we've learned that people love images of:

- People (especially people eating food)
- Statues of people
- Women in bikinis (note: We target our Facebook ads exclusively to women)
- Wizards (don't ask)
- Handwritten/drawn doodles on the above types of images

people gravitate to viral content that's written about them.  For example, readers don't care about or connect with the statement that a restaurant is good as they do with the assertion that people love a restaurant because of X, Y, and Z.

Love this

Content marketing, after all, is just journalism without standards

Content marketing as a whole is not a one-off investment, but a routine that needs to be repeated day in and day out.

I actually hate this....

It's not rocket science; it's just hard work.

Because I worked as a programmer in aerospace for a short while including with an engineer who did the vibration analysis on the first American rocket that didn't explode on the launch pad due to vibration problems. They were smart engineers, but mostly they were hard working, persistent, studied their mistakes and what worked and iterated to solution. Pretty much like what the article suggests was their approach to content marketing. The big difference is that in rocket science the formulae are dictated by laws of physics... the challenge is figuring out what the variables are!

[JasonD]

> Many nuggets in there and well worth reading in entirety.

Yup it's a great read.

>And this helps with the HIPPO problem too

Hippo problem?

>Hard work.

Who'd have thunk it

[ergophobe]

>>Hippo problem?

Actually HiPPO problem - Highest Paid Person's Opinion

HiPPO, as it relates to web analytics, is an acronym for "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" or "Highest Paid Person in Organization", the term is widely used and made famous by Web Analytics guru Avinash Kasuhik (Not sure if he actually coined the term).
 --src: http://www.optimizationtoday.com/web-analytics/what-is-a-hippo/

And around the culture...

A/B Testing is dead. Ask a HIPPO - http://www.askahippo.com/

JC Penneys tragic outcome after a period of HIPPO leadership - http://www.forbes.com/sites/derosetichy/2013/04/15/what-happens-when-a-hippo-runs-your-company/

[ergophobe]

I just shared this with some folks and looked back over it and found it as good on second look as on first.

Excuse me if it's annoying that I bumped this... I am just a bit surprised by how little reaction it got and thought maybe a lot of people missed it. Or maybe y'all are just less impressed with it than I am.

In any case, thanks again for posting Jason. It has given me a lot to think about.

[Rupert]

Yes read an enjoyed, and thanks for bumping it

I should have said thanks Jason for posting.  Poor Manners, slap wrist Rupert.

I felt a little exhausted to be honest after reading it.  I sometimes feel quite alone! Still just take a part of it, and it has to be good.  The idea of avoiding the Hippos has been logged away though.

Google docs for Brainstorming. 

[JasonD]

No thanks needed, I just thought it was an amazing article giving pretty much a blueprint  to success.

[ergophobe]

I felt a little exhausted to be honest after reading it. 

Yes, it is both inspiring and intimidating at the same time. Still, it's something I can imagine poring over periodically and taking whatever I can digest each time.