After a shaky 2018, publishers are positioned to start the new year with less dependency on the platforms. But the chase to consistently create ROI from content is still somewhat unclear. According to Content Marketing Institute, one-third of B2C marketers and 42% of B2B marketers do not measure content growth, with many of them citing it's just not tangible enough to understand.
But the continued creation of quality content, and the ability to measure its growth, will be a key indicator of success in the coming year. Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, cites the rise of direct-to-consumer marketing as an emerging trend to track in 2019. The increased value of influencer marketing and brand partnerships means publishers now have the opportunity to make an honest connection with their readers without dealing with messy third-party data, vendors, or ad tech. Without the middlemen, creating connections and sparking conversations with audiences will be easier than ever.
But creating lasting organic loyalty, and in turn sustainable revenue, takes both quality content and adaptive tech to not only support the content, but set it up for success and repeat engagement. RebelMouse is parked at the intersection of product and strategy to make this happen for sites of all sizes. We have five pillars we abide by to help us grow and launch new media powerhouses:
- Page Speed: Our site performance is above the industry leaders and massively scalable. In the modern publishing ecosystem, it's vital to rise above the noise.
- Organic Social Reach: RebelMouse's proprietary technology weaves in social from the start of the content creation process. We've mastered a formula for building organic reach not just once, but month over month for continuous momentum.
- SEO: RebelMouse offers next-level SEO tools on every article. These features leverage a strategic approach that gives editors an active role in growing organic reach on search.
- Multivariate Testing: Tune in to your audience. Our testing environment is easy to optimize based on data to create more loyalty and reach.
- Constantly Modern and Iterative: The tech giants change and update their algorithms constantly. Staying modern with features that respond to these frequent changes is the difference between life and death in content. RebelMouse is designed to deploy iterations in response to platform changes many times a week across our entire platform.
These five pillars are the components that make up our formula for growth. Here's more detail on how they all work together:
Faster Performance: Scale Massive Audiences Quickly
There's a lot of talk in our industry about the importance of content — which is valid — but the difficult part about it is that quality content is worth nothing if nobody can consume it. This is why site speed and performance are so key to growing audiences at scale.
At the end of 2018, Google redesigned its PageSpeed Insights tool. Now sites face an even tougher scoring system for site optimization. At RebelMouse, our sites are outperforming leading publishers who operate via expensive, custom CMS platforms.
We are outperforming giants in our space because RebelMouse developers have spent the past seven years preparing for a scoring system like Google's, while constantly optimizing our infrastructure for both speed and security. We use modern and reliable approaches to host our platform to ensure maximal stability. This means we host our infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, and all of our public endpoints are covered by custom content delivery network (CDN) configurations to provide incredible speed for end users across the globe.
It's why our sites have an average of over five pageviews per user.
Our clients get to experience this kind of growth because our infrastructure serves as the foundation of our tech, which creates performance on site, and in social and search.
Click here to learn more about our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Proprietary Social Tools: Designed for Organic Growth
Content creation has not been roped off from the masses for over a decade. Today, we live in a universe of creators. Many publishers have long decided that organic growth is dead, but in actuality, the rise of the influencer has illustrated perfectly that social listening is alive and well.
The odds are good that there's a natural audience out there that is already passionate about your message and mission, and is ready to engage and even participate alongside your content. You just have to find these fans. Our publishing solution helps you identify social pages that could unearth potential loyal followers via keywords. Once identified, you can reach out to them via a "like" on their page, tag them in a comment, or even send them an email directly from our Entry Editor. And we make sure that every publish is rich with dynamic imagery through our media bar that pulls content from social sources, including YouTube, Facebook, GIPHY, Instagram, and more.
Unlock organic growth again.
A brief glimpse into our proprietary social technology.
SEO Tools: Grow Google Traffic With Every Publish
In 2018, search made a comeback, and it's an exciting trend to embrace again. With Facebook's fake news fallout and coinciding controversial algorithm change at the beginning of the year, Google seized upon the opening in Facebook's armor and inched ahead of the social platform for referral traffic. This reversal in leaders not only gives sites another chance at control over their content and page views, but it also illustrates that users are willing to diversify from the platforms as well.
Our unique SEO infrastructure is designed to secure a search win with every publish. Each article can be given a new search phrase to "win," and our search optimization tools will help you optimize external links, URL slugs, and metadata to win your phrase. It's what has helped many of our clients reach page one on Google.
Start ranking on page one. Click here for more.
A look at how content creators can conquer search with every publish right from our Entry Editor.
A Network Designed for Communities: Create Loyalty and Return Visitors
It takes a village to create multidimensional content that can build sticky audiences. Chances are, you have a small content team that is not only in charge of writing and curation, but also making sure that every article is optimized for growth. This is why we created Creators Network, a streamlined structure where content teams can write and publish with maximum efficiency.
On the back end, we've designed a new content workflow that allows creators to make sure every post is reviewed and tweaked before going live with annotations, real-time notifications, and comment threads. Additionally, we have an intuitive roles-and-ratings system for authors of all levels to contribute to your site.
On the front end, this community-fueled strategy can be displayed in a way that encourages viral consumption. Our infinite scroll and Social UX layout mimics the social feeds, and optimizes each scroll for added page views. It's the same design that launched media powerhouse Axios, paving the way for a new era of digital writing.
Click here to learn more about RebelMouse's Creators Network.
Make sure every article is looking its best before publish with our dynamic collaboration tools.
Multivariate Testing at Scale: Test Across Multiple Dimensions with Core KPI Measurements
Creative teams with great ideas are most successful when they have an environment where ideas can easily be tested against each other. For teams to stay focused while being enabled with this type of creative capacity, it's vital that all ideas end up getting measured. All of the variant testing we enable is measured against the core KPIs that were established at launch by default. So pages per session, bounce rates, total engagement, and conversion goals are all easy to measure for your exact mission.
Knowing all data will be put to the test also has a huge impact on how meetings are conducted and how creative ideas are expressed. It's often easier to be passionate about the importance of a new idea when you know there will be no hard measures of its performance, and these are the types of creative ideas and passions that often misalign with actual growth. When teams know every test can and will be tested against core KPIs, it keeps everyone's creative energy focused on actually moving the needle.
The creative potential — when you understand how to test variants with our platform — is unlimited. Click here to learn more.
Easily A/B test layouts right from our intuitive Layout & Design tool.
Constantly Modern and Iterative: Your Content Is Always Optimized and Safe
The duopoly of Facebook and Google may swing in different directions, but one thing is always for certain: The tech giants will have the upper hand. Still, most web properties rely on the media oligarchy for referral traffic. Keeping up with their constant algorithm changes and product shifts is nearly impossible, and in fact, focusing on staying current could prove to be fatal for your own site's growth.
At RebelMouse, our tech takes care of the heavy lifting. Our team of developers double as traffic experts who are always anticipating the next move in distributive publishing. Since we're at the intersection of both product and strategy, we're always creating new features and deploying new iterations to keep up with the industry giants so you can focus on content.
Many of our updates are designed to cater to the modern content creator who has the make-or-break responsibility of producing quality content and distributing it for maximum success. But we also deploy daily and weekly updates to our product to ensure that not only is content always optimized for growth, but that customer data is never vulnerable to any sort of hacking or security vulnerability. Because we're a centralized CMS, we do not need to deploy software updates and hope that each client remembers to upgrade things themselves. Instead, we deploy them to all of our sites at once, many times without web administrators even noticing the change.
Publishing on a centralized CMS keeps your content, safe, updated, and ready to mold to the latest trends from the platform giants. Click here to learn more.
Fuel Growth in 2019
There is no one sure-fire way to create growth and drive traffic to your website in 2019 given the current publishing climate, and that's okay. But the weight of keeping up with the platform giants should not be put entirely on the shoulders of digital teams, large or small.
At RebelMouse, we've mastered all of the key features required to publish in a landscape that is unstable and always in danger of upheaval due to an algorithm update, massive technical upgrade, or dramatic shift in reader habits. And we do it at a cost that's far less than what's required of a custom-built platform or WordPress VIP solution.
Unlock new audiences so you can create new revenue opportunities in 2019. Request a proposal today and let's start working together.
