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Copyright © RebelMouse 2020
RebelMouse is a unique platform and company. The company was founded on the vision that media companies would need an always-modern solution to thrive in the new connected internet, and that brands would have to behave like new media companies and use the same platforms.
The Intersection of Design and Development: Where Your Clients Thrive
We started RebelMouse seven years ago knowing that there was a fundamental design flaw in the world of traditional CMSs: Every instance, on every platform, had to be updated independently. It's similar to an era when users had to manage their own Microsoft Exchange Server for email. The costs of managing, maintaining, and iterating on a CMS to keep it awesome and world class is typically a $10 million-a-year endeavor. But even then, these cost-prohibitive CMSs are still behind the times.
Understand what Lighthouse 6.0 and Core Web Vitals mean for your website's future
Since Google's page speed changes in 2018, publishers have engaged in a mad dash to figure out how to build dynamic sites and maintain performance scores that meet the search engine's user experience expectations. Now in 2020, when people are online more than ever, excellent site performance is no longer optional.
Earlier this year, Google released version 6.0 of Lighthouse. As a reminder, Lighthouse is a tool built into the latest version of Google Chrome that helps you determine how well your site is performing, and tells you which pages on your site need improvement. So let's look at what's changed.
What Differentiates Our Approach
There are many popular tools that allow you to perform experiments and A/B tests on your users — primarily Google Chrome Experiments and Optimizely. But all of these solutions are JavaScript additions to your web page that sidestep the problem of old, outdated, and clumsy CMSs. These solutions work by calling on a third-party JavaScript library that rewrites a page after it's rendered. This approach adds extra page weight and creates strange user experiences due to having to wait for everything to load and be rewritten on the fly.
At RebelMouse, we've solved this in a very elegant way. At the core level of our platform, we can natively render different layouts and track the exact differences in performance when comparing a test to your other layouts.
An SEO Strategy That Wins With Every Publish
How exactly Google determines search ranking largely remains a mystery for publishers, but what we do know is that the search engine continuously rolls out updates to its algorithm. And while sometimes these updates are small and nearly unnoticeable, other times they result in massive changes around the way Google crawls content, often disrupting the rankings of webpages all across the globe.
With each one of these algorithm changes comes a new approach to search strategy. It's a lot to keep up with in a competitive digital landscape. Publishers are already burdened with the task of creating high-performing quality content that's easy to find on Google and, in turn, easily shared across social. It's a job that can't be solved with advertising dollars either. It's estimated that nearly 80% of users disregard paid search results. Pair this with the fact that 93% of all online experiences begin with a search query and you're left with the realization that it's never been more important to prioritize search engine optimization.
The good news is that RebelMouse has a unique approach to SEO that leverages the tools available to us from the open web alongside our proprietary technology that enables users to win key phrases with every publish. The best part? The platform is designed to empower the people who live closest to content: writers and editors. Here's how it works.
Become the center of the universe on your topic.
In today's digital world, organic growth is everything. The old pay-to-play mantra adopted by many publishers is putting them at the mercy of Facebook's temperamental News Feed.
If you want to survive the constant algorithm updates and technological changes, your focus must be on building a community that constantly sparks conversations among its audience. To do so, you have to connect with likeminded Facebook Pages and social profiles at scale, and that starts with quality content. But sometimes good content isn't enough. At RebelMouse, we have a saying: "If you create quality content without distribution, does it even exist?" That's why we created Discovery, an integral part of our suite of sophisticated enterprise-level tools. Using proprietary technology, Discovery is designed to help you figure out the social ecosystem that's already having conversations related to your content. But before you can reach out to potential influencers, your content has to be set up for distributive success.
Create Modular + Reusable Design Patterns on RebelMouse
Content saturation is an industry-wide problem, and the e-commerce space is no exception given that it's filled with big brands, small Etsy stores, and everyone in between all fighting for similar audiences. The best way to fight this symptom is to understand your audience and provide them with what they want.
Revolutionizing E-commerce on RebelMouse
Whether you're a brand with a blog or a media company with a site, driving purchasing behavior and building an audience that uses your content to find things they love to buy is vital. We're very proud to have built out the same functionality that everyone is now used to on Instagram, with layovers on images that lead to products with attribution.
RebelMouse is much more than just a replacement for a traditional CMS. Our platform is a tremendous community-building experience. Today's social ecosystem has given us a seemingly limitless number of premium creators who understand how to create gorgeous and relevant content that drives the growth of their own audiences. These creators and influencers are either experts in certain topics, or heavily engaged in targeted content that drives their interests. They're not only consuming the content they're passionate about, but they're contributing to the conversation, too. The new role of the editor is not just to cover the most important topics and people around their expertise, but also to invite those preferred influencers into their community and get them to participate in creating premium content.
Content creation has never been static. Since the early days of social, the relationship between publishers and readers has blurred and warped into what's now the state of digital publishing in 2020. At RebelMouse, we started out as a social feeds aggregator and subsequently went viral as the "social front page." Since then, we've obsessed over the best ways to share content in today's social world despite its unpredictable seasons.
For years, the role of the publisher was isolated, and the inner workings of how content was created was confined to the hands of creators. Publishers once operated a behind-the-scenes news desk that facilitated content for its readers. Now it's become a gigantic whiteboard meeting attended by the entire social ecosystem.
Today's audiences are craving authenticity and transparency, which has created the rise of the social influencer and birthed a universe of creators. Whatever your message may be — whether it's to sell a product or simply inform your users — it must be validated by others.
That's why we've created a workflow for our publishing solution that nurtures a community of creators. Because in the current climate, it takes a village to build user loyalty. Here's what it entails:
A Synergetic Platform: We've created an intuitive process that allows each article to be created as a collective process between team members, influencers, or any contributor to your content experience.
Detailed Approval Workflows: A post submitted by a community member never goes live without the review and approval of an administrator. Writers with zero publishing rights can submit drafts for approval rounds, and drafts can also be saved at every stage of the editorial process.
No matter how big your content team may be, each article likely starts with a core creator. Once completed, their draft content is typically submitted for review and revisions before publish. RebelMouse's Entry Editor now makes this process seamless for creators, so they can spend more of their time focusing on creating quality content that's optimized for both search and social.
The workflow for a creator is comprised of:
Content Creation: A creator begins crafting a post using our powerful publishing software, taking care to get the most out of our integrated media bar to increase reach and the likelihood of a click.
Tagging: The creator then organizes their content with applicable tags to make sure it shows up in all the right places on the site. These tags are also used as search keywords.
SEO Best Practices: Next, the creator optimizes their post for the search phrase they want to win in the SERPs. By targeting a specific phrase for each article, each piece of content has a better chance of ranking high against Google's search algorithm.
Submitting for Review: Finally, the creator submits their post for review before heading off to their next assignment.
Creators can add annotations to drafts at any time during the editorial process. Within the platform, there's a companion notifications-and-comments feed for writers and editors to review annotations, as well as a timeline that tracks edits.
Add Annotations: If you're reviewing a post in the Entry Editor, you can add annotations to any part of the content for the author to see.
Receive Notifications: There's an alert icon that appears in the top-right corner of the Entry Editor each time there's a new annotation or comment added to the post.
Comment Thread: Keep the communication open with a thread of all comments and annotations that've been left on a post.
The dashboard is where content creators, administrators, and contributors can see the current queue of posts and where each article stands in the content lifecycle. Based on a users' rights, they can also look at real-time stats to keep track of trends and any potential peaks or dips in traffic.
Stay up to Date
Never wonder where a post stands. Every phase of the workflow is clearly marked in the dashboard. If an article is still in review, it's marked with a yellow bar across the top of the draft.
Monitor Every Post
Within the dashboard, users can see the latest pieces of content in the queue, their status, and when they were created. Preview, edit, or search for any article right from within the dashboard.
Stay on Top of Stats
The post dashboard houses not only the post queue, but also customizable statistics on performance, including the number of pageviews for each post and on site overall. Posts can be further filtered by date published, author, and keyword. The metrics available to each user are dependent on a member's role on the platform. For example, an editor may not be able to see as many stats as a user with administrative rights.
The new content workflow is designed to make each step of the content lifecycle intuitive and easy to control. Administrators are able to see the flow of content being published, and can quickly note any turns in reach, engagement, or even publishing cadence.
At RebelMouse, this workflow is just one part of our CMS that's helped launch new media powerhouses like Axios and The Dodo. It's why legacy brands like United chose our platform to launch their content hub.
Start optimizing your content and its lifecycle today. We launch sites fast. We also offer strategy services to make sure your media property reaches its biggest audience at scale while still generating revenue. Let's create something together today.
Users are ready to pay for content that delivers.
It's been a long and winding path, but in 2020 the subscription model continues its upward trajectory as a top revenue strategy for publishers of all sizes. The tug of war between platforms and publishers reached its peak in the last few years of the previous decade, leaving users desperate for a modern user experience that's clear of any clutter from the duopoly. This is why intelligent paywall models are a top choice for users looking to consume content right from the source. When done correctly, the strategy can work for any type of media. The New York Times, a frequent showpiece example of the power of paywalls, is constantly reporting record-busting subscription numbers, including 3.5 million digital subscriptions last fall.
And it all makes perfect sense. The subscription model eliminates the middleman — such as the platforms — so readers get the experience and content they want, and publishers get the cash they need.
As a creative agency powered by modern technology, we know how to build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their first year leveraging the RebelMouse paywall strategy, La Verità saw 800% audience growth with an average of 16 pages per visitor, far above the industry standard. Their continued, unprecedented growth makes them one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've experienced significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
In the past, there was a stigma around paywalls that signaled they were only sustainable for large publishers with massive audiences already in place. But with today's users maturing, subscription models are more attainable for a variety of emerging media properties and legacy names alike.
It's important to strike the right balance between free content, subscriber revenue, and ad strategy. This is a lot to juggle for publishers who are already maxed out trying to create quality content worth reading.
At RebelMouse, we can help you determine if a subscription model will benefit you, and then build a custom, easy-to-use paywall system that works for your site. If you're not publishing on RebelMouse, we also operate as a world-class creative agency that can help you navigate the subscription business and any other content strategy you may be building toward. Either way, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
Help your audience find its voice.
Creating quality content is no longer on marketers alone. We live in a universe of creators who are willing to not only consume content that resonates, but play a role in the creation, promotion, and conversations surrounding it.
Since the start of RebelMouse, we've been on a journey to create dynamic media that is easier for content creators to curate and amplify on social. It's why we've built an online engagement platform centered around the power of communities that thrive naturally in the digital ecosystem.
In order to define distributive publishing, we have to ask the following question: If you have quality content, but nobody sees it, does it even exist? The answer is no, because your content needs to be supported in a way that lets it move seamlessly across all channels, especially site, search, and social. But let's take this question a step further: If you can't monetize your content to generate the support it needs, how do you create quality content in the first place?
Why massive enterprise organizations are switching to RebelMouse.
Delivering a secure, high-performing environment with extreme reliability is essential to all of our clients at RebelMouse. We only use industry-leading, reliable approaches to host our infrastructure. This ensures maximum stability and security for all our clients' data. Here are just some of the tools and practices we leverage to maintain a hard-bodied product that's flexible, too.
Picking up the pieces and the importance of building trust in a pandemic
As the second half of 2020 begins to pass us by, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on throughout the global community. The longevity of the pandemic has left thousands of industries struggling to find an appropriate position in the marketplace that will allow them to sustain themselves alongside daily tragedy.
The pandemic is far from over, but publishers and marketers are beginning to sift through the aftershocks of what COVID-19 has done to the web. Here's a quick look at the decline in conversion growth during the first few weeks of the pandemic in the United States:
Join RebelMouses's modern and distributive workforce responsible for the websites of media powerhouses, including legacy brands like United Airlines and new media darlings like PAPER Magazine and Protocol.
If you feel like you've never quite fit into boxes or labels within the tech space, we want to hear from you. Built on a foundation of site performance, our cloud-based platform reaches 50+ million people a month with an always-modern approach to product and strategy.
Our fully remote team spans 25+ countries and has very flexible schedules. If you don't want to be confined to an office chair, and like the idea of being able to work from any place in the world you choose, we're a match.
RebelMouse is dedicated to pursuing inclusion for all individuals, regardless of their gender identity, sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, age, or disability. We work hard to form meaningful relationships beyond our platform, and it's this passion that has formed what is now a diverse software company and creative agency that's bucking industry norms. For us, diversity is a company pillar, not just a statistic.
Click here to browse our current opportunitiesGoogle recently announced that its Rich Results Test is out of beta and now fully supports all of its rich results features.
Powered by structured data, rich results are the dynamic snippets you see at the top of Google's search results, whether it's a carousel, image, or listicle.
The Rich Results Test determines if your website's structured data is set up correctly so that your page can be eligible for rich results. With this latest update, Google will be deprecating its Structured Data Testing Tool. Here are some reasons from Google about why the prioritization of their Rich Results Test is an upgrade:
Today's media landscape has put publishers in a tough position. They're making less money than ever before, on top of struggling with rising costs and technical inefficiencies. Our data on over 100+ high-traffic sites gives us a unique opportunity to see what kind of websites are successful in this climate and, perhaps more importantly, what sort of sites are failing. This enables us to build optimized sites with a built-in growth strategy.
For any website that needs help getting out of a rut, but might not have the funds to take on a complete design and strategy overhaul, our new intelligent Social UX Layout provides a unique solution. The layout combines the best of what we do in search engine optimization (SEO), design, and overall strategy into one iterable solution that achieves amazing results without the high cost.