Welcome to the Week #20

Welcome to the week!

Today is the birthday of Olga Korbut. Not a name that’s familiar to you? Well in 1972 Olga Korbut represented the Soviet Union at the Munich Olympic Games, leaving her competition behind to walk away with three gold medals in women’s gymnastics.

Korbut was known as the ‘Sparrow of Minsk’ and her tiny frame – just 4’11” and 82 pounds – was capable of the most incredible gymnastics moves. She took a sport that was then dominated by older, larger athletes and redefined what it meant to be an Olympic gymnast. Instead of focusing on artistry and elegance as had been traditional, Korbut instead used her technical flair and incredible skill (and not a little bit of courage, too) to find her way to the top of the Olympic podium. So influential would she be in the sport that competitors nearly 50 years later continue to use her eponymous elements in their Olympic routines.

Korbut shook up international gymnastics by looking at what everyone else was doing, understanding her skills lay in a related but separate category, and performed so well that judges had no choice but to award her the win. A lesson for marketers, perhaps, who have ideas about moving forward that don’t quite fit with the standard approaches?

Here’s some more food for thought…

That’s Billion, With a B

Every digital marketer likes to keep track of their key performance indicators. They track unique visitors, click through rates, social media shares, engagement rates, use heat maps, and A-B test their sites like crazy to squeeze another 1% out of a high performing landing page. There’s a fight for every page view, every second on the page, and any startup business can tell you that lifting the audience by even a few hundred visitors can spell the difference between closing out a week feeling like a winner or closing out a week feeling like there’s no path forward.

And then there are the big media sites. Sure, they care a lot about their KPIs, too, but an extra hundred visitors here or there probably isn’t going to get anyone too excited or too depressed. Most of the biggest players in major media employ hundreds, even thousands of staff and have global teams working around the clock to ensure that their traffic doesn’t drop. But not all of them have this army of workers. Indeed, the third biggest media site in the US is run by a team of just two.

According to Similar Web’s Digital Vision report for April the Drudge Report finished behind only MSN and ESPN when it came to page views. The Drudge Report’s 1 billion – yes, BILLION – page views made it twice as popular as the New York Times (505 million), three times bigger than the Huffington Post (355 million), and four times the size of the Washington Post (255 million). What’s more, the Drudge Report also stands out for its lack of social traffic (0% of its total) and its miniscule mobile traffic (6% compared to other properties that are 30%, 40% and even 60% mobile).

The business model is unique and a visit to the site suggests that – if you can make it work – you don’t need screeds of content, a social media strategy, and an enormous team to win eyeballs online.

Getting reddit Right

Reddit is one of the great white whales of the online marketing world. It has enormous traffic, can deliver hundreds of thousands of readers, and can launch businesses with just a solitary appearance on the fabled front page. Yet many are the companies that have sought to boost their bottom lines with an appearance or promotional run on reddit only to find themselves skewered by the anti-corporate hive mind of redditors.

Simply posting your latest blog post on a random subreddit is not going to deliver the sort of win you’re looking for on reddit, and nor is attempting to fool the readers into clicking your way a good strategy to employ. If you are going to succeed on reddit then you’re going to have to be smart about your interactions with the site, the users, and understand the rules.

At Medium Lena Elkins has a nice post explaining how to succeed on reddit. The basics are all there – don’t be fake, understand the rules of subreddits, choose the right place to post – as are some more advanced tips like demographic concerns and content quality and consistency. Check it out before dipping your toes into the reddit pool – you’ll be glad you did. 

This Week on The DOZ Blog 

We’re offering up some great content this week taking in everything from design to working habits. Tomorrow we’ll take a closer look at the winners of the most recent Webby Awards for homepage design to find out what they did so well, and what you can learn from the winners. We’ll also have posts that help you streamline your business processes in a paperless world that still has a fair bit of paper in it, ideas for taking on social media and winning as a small business, and ways in which to take a business global with success. Plenty of practical tips and served with our special DOZ sauce on the side.

Want More Marketing Goodness?

Every Monday morning DOZ delivers the best marketing content directly to inboxes around the world. Subscribe to DOZ’s Marketing Monday for a generous serving of the best in digital marketing, SEO, and the tactics and strategies to drive your business forward this year. Want in? Add your name to the list and start your week a little smarter.

Time to Get to Work

Know a great piece on marketing that we missed? If so, let us know and we’ll share it with the world, crediting your good self, of course, with the tip. Send your sources straight to Content Manager Dylan and you could be featured in next week’s Welcome to the Week post.

Are you going to shake up the marketing world like Olga Korbut? Or are you going to make it a ho-hum week with about the same motivation you brought to your high school geography project? Let’s hope it’s the former – the world needs to be shaken up!

Welcome to the week – now get stuck into it.