From writing on my own, to competing with GQ & Esquire in less than 18 months
After joining The Idle Man as Copywriter, I quickly became a leading member of the marketing team as my background in music journalism allowed me to attract major musicians for exclusive interviews and increase traffic. This then led to my promotion to Editor, less than a year since joining the company as their sixth member of staff.
We went from 35,000 unique users to over 1,000,000 in less than 12 months
When I took over as Editor, we were attracting 35,000 unique users per month. Through a precise and aggressive SEO-led editorial strategy, myself and the Editor-In-Chief took the blog to over 2,000,000 users by the time I left 18 months later.
In the time I was Editor I introduced a detailed Editorial Style Guide, detailed daily reporting, built a network of hundreds of remote writers, partnered with many lifestyle brands to deliver exclusive lead-gen competitions, re-designed the blog twice for a more considered customer experience, branched out into other key customer lifestyle interests with success, introduced commercial practices to drive more revenue and built a young and hungry team from scratch that went on to achieve great things.
The Strategy
Our main goal at The Idle Man was to increase organic traffic and turn the blog into a major stream in terms of traffic acquisition, email registrations and, ultimately, revenue. We achieved this by focusing on the following initiatives.
Long Form Blog Content
By concentrating on the quality of the content, rather than the quantity, some of our blog pages were acquiring thousands of views per day, every day, due to ranking well for multiple high-volume and high-competition keywords. This long-form and high-quality philosophy was the foundation of every other content initiative.
Link-Worthy/ Shareable Content
Content, such as The History of Sneakers interactive timeline, saw us pick up free links and press by creating original, engaging and in depth content.
Influencer Initiatives
By branching out into other areas with our editorial; such as music, travel, fitness and food, we interviewed hundreds of people to create in-depth e-books that we compiled through our blog's interviews and then distributed around key cultural moments in the calendar.
By encouraging the influencers to also share the book, we increased the awareness and digital foot print. These initiatives led to 10,000+ email subscriptions, 100s of links from blogs and publications and 100s of tags on social media from influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers.
Brand Building Content
By also building a strong reputation within the electronic music industry, we launched our very own podcast of exclusive mixes every month from some of the biggest names in house, drum & bass and UKG. This helped to build a "halo effect" for the rest of our comms in terms of brand perception.
The Numbers
- 50,000+ email registrations
- 1300%+ lift in visitors in 12 months
- 367% lift in revenue from blog in 12 months
- 100+ remote freelance writers
- 50+ partnered lead-gen competitions
- 20+ articles published and edited per day at peak
- 10 in-house staff writers, deputies and sub-editors
- 4 original e-books
- 2 major brand partnerships
