As a real estate blog, in 2 years it was possible to increase the number of monthly visits to the site from 2 thousand to 18 million

How do you compete with sites that are 25 times larger than yours in content, provided that the advertising budget of such sites exceeds the total income of your site for all 7 years of its existence? Probably nothing. So many answer. But practice shows that sometimes you have to take risks, make unexpected and, possibly, even paradoxical decisions. The material presented in this article, of course, is a special case, but the experience that the guys from Movoto generously share is definitely worth taking into account. That is why we have translated this article, complementing it with some useful content marketing materials. Now you will learn how the company managed to increase the number of monthly visits to the site from 2 thousand to 18 million. You can do it too!

Over the past 2 years, the content strategy on the Movoto website has been to find and exploit flaws in the strategies of larger competitors. As well as the Oakland A site, who fought the Yankees and the Red Sox, Movoto can win by focusing on those segments of the market that their competitors do not cover.
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How did it all begin?



To achieve the desired goal, you must clearly understand this goal. First you need to clearly define what success means to you. The importance of this stage cannot be overestimated. You will strive for success as a moth to the light. And your every decision will be aimed at achieving a specific goal.

The objectives of Movoto, in order of importance, are:

1. Accurate calculation of the volume of citations (references, mentions, TV ads, etc.)
2. The number of articles published weekly.
3. The quality of articles, which we define by the number of reposts. Everything is very simple. If the online community often shares an article from a blog, then this is a reason for joy, because the Internet knows everything.

You can ask the company's employees: “Hey, Randy and Chris, what role does income play in this whole process?” The answer can be obtained by viewing the video from Moz Whiteboard Friday:

1. Links are like a rising wave, which brings to the surface any sites.
2. Brand recognition.
3. And, of course, advertising revenue.

So, how did Movoto come up with the current content strategy? They tried many different methods, and even refused, of course, without much joy, from one of the goals.

Always mentally start thinking about the process from the end, not from the beginning.

In the case of Movoto, this meant the following: links, links and more links.
The first thought of the guys is not “Oh, this is how it will be great!”, Or “This information will look great on The Atlantic website”, or “This material will be mega-popular!” users who want to follow the link and go to our website? "

To answer this question, you must find the answer to three other questions:

1. Is there a large group of sites that occupy the same specific niche?
2. Do these sites have links to other resources?
3. Can you create content that meets the standards of this group of sites? (Hint: if you show enough creativity, the answer to all three questions will be “yes”).

To answer the first question, Movoto used tools such as Ahrefs and Technorati's list of blogs (which now unfortunately does not exist), and also carried out a huge search job at Google.

While studying the Internet, the specialists revealed two following niches:

1. Personal Finance.
2. Video games.

Having at their disposal these two options, they looked at several sites to find out which links to which pages they contain.

Personal finance sites are usually run by parents who want to share their own experiences. As a rule, they do not place many links to other sites, which is amazing. If they add links, then only to indicate the source of the material on the site.

On video game sites there are links to any "cool" things, and there are A LOT of such links.

So you might think that Movoto, being a real estate site, should start writing about video games. At first, the company's employees had the same idea.

Therefore, they immediately had a question: how to combine video games and real estate? To solve this problem, they began to organize daily half-hour brainstorming sessions. The meetings took place every day at the same time and lasted exactly 30 minutes.

Brainstorming sessions are not in the typical format when one person stands in front of an entire audience and writes ideas on the board. This method is ineffective for many reasons, including the fact that one person cannot speak at the same time with someone else, and someone may be afraid to voice an unsuccessful idea.

Therefore, everyone generates their ideas separately, but at the same time, all together - in the same Google document, where all entries are made anonymously. Thanks to this method, everyone can poke fun at the ideas of others, write down their ideas immediately after they appear and not be afraid that the proposed idea will be unsuccessful (in fact, there are no such ideas). As a result, in 30 minutes there is a huge amount of ideas that need to be finalized.
In the end, it was decided that even characters from video games should have their own housing. Thus you can successfully combine real estate and video games.

Now we need to find people who will read all this ...
For users to share your content, you need to see it.



The above structural diagram shows Content Marketing-101 - it works flawlessly. Promotion of the content does not hide any secrets: this is just a constant, long-term work, which over time becomes more and more effective.

The whole point is to send emails to the right people in the right organizations and attach the right material to such emails. Movoto can develop three or four unique versions of the same story, depending on who the letter is intended for.

The importance of this stage is difficult to overestimate. It makes no sense to carry out all this work, if then your letter, without opening, will immediately be deleted from the inbox. Take the time to think about how you want to attract the recipient of the message, so that he familiarized himself with the content.

Even when the content speaks for itself, you still need powerful helpers and bloggers who:

1. Open the message.
2. Click on the link to go to the page.

If you fail to achieve these two goals with the help of your emails, nobody will ever see your content.
Every day, the Movoto team spends 1-2 hours to develop a daily marketing ploy. They use a large whiteboard to mark the main aspects of each article. At each such meeting, they try to determine the following:

1. How would you describe this article in a conversation with your mom?
2. Create a clear instruction for action (follow the link or send us a reply email).
3. Explain to users the benefits or value added, so that they want to subsequently link to it
4. Answer the question about why this topic was chosen.



Here is an example of a marketing move that was recently implemented:



Hi Tim!
I thought you would like this idea, considering that you are interested in daily news from the world of economics.
The Grist infographic, which shows the average temperature over the past 27 years, inspired us to study how temperature changes affect the value of real estate. We found that as the temperature increased by 0.25 ° C, the cost of a residential building drops by $ 250: www.movoto.com/reports/climate-change.html .
For example, over the past 4 years, the cost of homes in New York State has fallen by more than $ 9 billion due to global warming.
I would be glad to know what your colleagues and you think about this study.
Chris Colmar
www.movoto.com

The level of social interaction on different sites (per article)



We have already talked about keeping in mind the ultimate goal of our program, and in almost any case this will not mean that we have to reinvent the wheel. There is a very good reason why some things are as they are - this is because they work, moreover, they work reliably and in a big way. The latter quality is of particular importance for achieving our goal.

You have to do your homework

The first step in building your own marketing strategy is to study what the owners of other sites are doing. By "other sites" we do not mean a specific industry or market segment, but Internet content in general. And not just content, but truly successful content.

Such things serve as a topic for the beginning of a conversation at a party, run through offices in numerous e-mails and, of course, are actively distributed in various social networks.
In the case of Movoto, the “10 thousand feet” approach was adopted, and the guys began to search for successful content that became the most popular. Among others were found:

• Articles with different ratings and numbered lists.
• Cards of clicks (and maps in general).
• Colorful images in high resolution.
• Really interesting infographics.
• Video files.

It is also important to find and understand trends that in the computer world are as fleeting as trends in the world of fashion or fast food.

Things become stylish, and then go out of fashion; for some time, infographics were very popular, but click cards took their place. Articles with ratings and lists have risen to the top of popularity only to give this place to video files, etc.

The ability to determine the quality content of a day / week / month depends largely on whether you are an expert in Internet content. You simply can not create popular content (or understand it) if you are not its consumer. Our favorite sites include:

• Buzzfeed
• Upworthy
• Digiday
• NiemanLab
• ViralNova

Continued - should !