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Here’s Why You Should Focus on Valley Elevation

We've all experienced it. The dopamine-filled highs of watching site stats blast through the ceiling on our favorite web analytics platform after a piece of content goes viral. As digital publishers, it's in our blood to crave these spikes. But the sobering crash back to reality that follows, and the ensuing scramble to come up with the next piece of content that can match the previous peak, are seemingly inevitable. This constant seesawing is a frustrating and fatiguing experience, no matter the size of your budget or marketing team. What's a publisher seeking stability to do? Are we all targeting the right goals, or is there more here than meets the eye?

Enter Valley Elevation

Turns out there is more to your stats than just those towering summits. It's the concept of valley elevation, and it's been staring you in the face the entire time. Coined by Bradley Schwarzenbach and popularized by bestselling author Andrew Davis, valley elevation posits that you should be focusing on the depth of your metrics' troughs instead of its peaks.


RebelMouse-powered Azula's pageview performance following their replatform to our technology at the end of August 2017. Applause-worthy peaks abound but, more importantly, we see strong valley growth three months post launch.

Instead of chasing the next high, successful publishers focus on ensuring that their next drop isn't as deep as the one before it.

Why Is Valley Elevation so Important?

If we had to bet, chances are not every single piece of content you publish is hitting it out of the park. (Though if they are, kudos to you! We'd love to know more about what's working in your world.) In the regular world, content traction ebbs and flows depending on numerous factors, such as the quality of your creative and technical work, the breadth and depth of your audience, and whether or not the algorithms wake up on the right side of the bed. And like most, your site stats are going to spend more time on the ground than in the clouds.

This is why exciting spikes are not a true measure of the health or success of your site's traffic and engagement, nor an ironclad indicator of how well you and your team are (or aren't) performing. Like most things in life — stock market growth, raising a child, pursuing higher education — it's a marathon, not a sprint. You want to focus on best practices that will result in your valley floor steadily growing in elevation over time.

Put another way, which of the following scenarios sound more appealing to you?

  • Your site publishes content that goes viral a handful of times a month. But virality is fleeting and never guaranteed. And on days when your content takes off, your audience is largely unrecognizable. A flash mob that's gone as quickly as it came. You've satisfied the trending flavor of the moment, and you're lucky if they even noticed what site they were on before they left.
or
  • Your site publishes content that does not go viral as often as in the first scenario. But when your audience does show up in droves, they stick around and consume your other content. When they invite their friends to check out your articles, those new faces stick around, too. And they all come back periodically, whether or not you've recently published something earth shattering or not.

It's a rather stark comparison, but you'd take the second option every time. It's compound growth built on audience loyalty that you can reap the benefits of weeks, months, and years down the line.

"It's only when the tide goes out that you discover who's been swimming naked."

— Warren Buffett

What Does It Take to Grow a Valley?

In a nutshell? Best practices coupled with balance and consistency. Sounds simple — slow and steady wins the race, right? — but putting the discipline into practice isn't always the case. So let's take a step back and first look at what chasing peaks usually leads to:

  • Constantly shifting strategy and generally only throwing all your weight behind the latest trending topic, instead of branching out deeply into every area of expertise you specialize in
  • Creating content that offers few avenues for engagement or participation, and generally only exists to be consumed
  • Blasting your content across every channel and medium available to you with zero pacing, rhyme, or reason
  • Paying little attention to where your audience is coming from, who it consists of, or if they should even be on your site in the first place

By contrast, growing valleys requires:

  • Strategically building out topic clusters that keep your audience clicking through valuable post after valuable post on your site
  • Creating compelling content that organically sparks engagement, not begs for it
  • Enabling your audience by giving them the means to participate in discussions or provide feedback
  • Spending time understanding how your content is being consumed, so you can publish and promote it when your maximum audience is most receptive to it
  • Optimizing every part of your site for maximum conversion — so when and where a user enters your property is never a barrier to a good experience — and always iterating based on data tests you perform
  • Using the social and search platforms that most make sense for your business, and never dumping all of your eggs into one basket — all algorithms strike without prejudice
  • Reusing and repurposing evergreen content — both yours and others', with credit where it's due — to reinforce your expertise and avoid constantly sinking an enormous amount of effort into new content
  • Always searching for and connecting with relevant communities and influencers so they can become part of your army of content advocates and distributors

In truth, there may not be a limit to the number of ways you can grow your valleys. But the resounding theme, as we're sure you've noticed, is that you're constantly in tune with what is relevant to your audience, and operating around those needs without neglecting any one area. The right balance and direction may not always be exciting, but investing in a solid foundation tends to net exponential gains over the long run.

What Successful Valley Growth Looks Like

Earlier in this post, we showcased Azula's strong valley growth after three months of being on RebelMouse. Here's a broader look at how Azula has been doing since the end of August 2017.

True to what's expected, Azula has experienced a number of peaks and valleys over the past seven months. But as the trendline demonstrates, the majority of their valleys have settled at an elevation far above where they were when they started out on RebelMouse. That's the result of a loyal, growing audience consuming content on a 24/7 basis — not only when a grouper swallows a shark in one bite.

How RebelMouse Can Help You Grow Your Valleys

At RebelMouse, we have years of experience building digital properties that attract fervent audiences. Our global team is well-versed in every audience-building discipline, and our guidance is backed by and tested against mountains of data we've collected over time.

We take great pride in helping our clients realize their goals, and partnerships normally manifest in one of three ways:

  1. RebelMouse Platform: If your current platform isn't delivering the technical results you need, or hindering day-to-day operations, then we invite you to take a look at RebelMouse. Back when we began the company, we saw ahead of the curve and deliberately built our platform around social in every way. The culmination of our efforts resulted in what we call Social UX for Media, which propelled Axios into the limelight and turned it into a household name in under a year. Used in tandem with our proprietary Discovery functionality, you have all the tools you need to build a loyal audience that will jumpstart your valley elevation growth.
  2. Strategy Services: Media companies and brands alike often find themselves with surprisingly large divides between the key teams that drive the business. Editorial, data, product, sales, marketing, and revenue can all end up unintentionally working together in frustrating relationships and processes. Simultaneously, all the changes that are happening in digital distribution can cause greater conflict within the teams when figuring things out together, as well as create new obstacles. Bridging these gaps in a positive way that leads to an excited, happy culture with tangible loyalty metrics, new reach, and growth opportunities, is at the very core of what we do.
  3. A Combination of Both: A number of our clients build their properties on RebelMouse and lean heavily on us daily for our expertise. These are some of our favorite partnerships, as the line dividing us starts to blur and we morph into one big family, united in our pursuit of the same desires. Whether it's the Rebels for Good site network, or working side by side with founder and CEO Paul Berry, we provide something for everyone.

If you're interested in what it takes to migrate to our best-in-class CMS, or would like digital strategy help to get your current roadmap off the ground, contact us today. We'd love to discuss a potential partnership and succeed together.

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Meet RebelMouse

Build on a better platform that supports far-reaching content distribution, impactful conversion, and unparalleled loyalty.

The world's largest companies trust us to power their global, multiplatform content experience. As a platform, we're now one of the largest in the world, reaching 50+ million people every month. As a creative agency, we build mass pop culture hits that grow organically to become household names — Axios and The Dodo, for example.

We work strategically with United Airlines and many other brands to establish the new media roadmap for their future and implement it. RebelMouse was founded by the CTO who built The Huffington Post. The founding vision and mission is still the same today: to be the right new media platform for both media companies and brands. It's working exceedingly well, and we're delivering some staggering results for our clients.

Read our latest deck here!

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A PSA to Brands: Control Your Context

Resonate with your audience the right way

Programmatic Advertising Is a Gamble

For years, brands have relied on display ads and programmatic levers as a cheap and easy solution to spend large portions of marketing dollars. But the major frustration with programmatic advertising has always been the lack of control and transparency on where ads actually show up. And as banner blindness spreads, ad-blocking technology becomes more prevalent, and subpar or broken sites crop up at increasingly high rates, programmatic advertising will only become more expensive, unsustainable, and a huge risk.

According to a recent study from Integral Ad Science, when your programmatic ads happen to show up in high-quality environments, it could lead to a 30% lift in brand recall. But on the flip side, when your ads appear in low-quality environments, the consequences can be brutal: Ads in low-quality environments were perceived 74% less favorably, and even harshly, compared to the same ads seen on high-quality sites. Overall, users were four times less likely to think a brand cared about them after seeing the brand surface next to inappropriate content. Finding your ad in poor-quality environments creates a stronger impression among audiences, and it's not the kind of impression you want. Plus, it means that your paid marketing needs to work harder to boost your brand reputation, convert customers, and do damage control.

It's Time for Brands to Become Publishers and Take Control

As a brand marketer, you need to reclaim ownership of where and how your messaging shows up. One key way to control your context is to become a publisher. According to NewsWhip, 70% of people would rather learn about a brand through content than through ads, and 68% feel more positive about a company after engaging with the brand's content. And it's a good time for brands to go all in and create an advantage with content, too. Now, more than ever, page performance matters for audience reach, retention, and revenue. Google, along with Facebook, have explicitly made page speed a factor in search results and News Feed, while site visitors will quickly leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Media companies that have survived in the past with broken sites now feel the consequences of their low-performing properties due to their inability to provide solid returns to advertisers.

As a CMS platform and creative agency, RebelMouse partners with brand teams on best practices and innovative ways to build content experiences that will break through and resonate with audiences. For example, our work with United Airlines has produced a better-performing site and helped them beat out media companies to win travel search phrases for organic audience growth. Our partnership is a key reason why United Airlines' content now drives the most web engagement in their industry.

Choose Your Media Partners Wisely

If you plan to rely on media partners to place your messaging, then be selective and spend on the right context. Build direct relationships with quality publishers that prioritize the user experience and know how to pair editorial with premium advertising (in particular sponsored content) to maximize eyeballs and engagement for brands. RebelMouse powers a tight ecosystem of quality publishers, like PAPER Magazine and Motherly, that have built valuable, new media properties. We can connect brands into this network of quality sites to execute premium and effective campaigns at scale.

Build for the Future

Moving away from the inefficient world and disadvantages of programmatic advertising and creating a sustainable content marketing strategy is not easy — it takes organizational commitment, patience, and the right technologies. If you're a brand marketer, reach out and learn how RebelMouse's full-stack content marketing solution is ideal for your growth into a publishing powerhouse. If you're a media company and sell premium advertising, guide your advertising partners on how to build mutual value on your site when they're tempted to blindly toss marketing dollars on cheaper impressions.

Turn Casual Visitors Into Loyal Subscribers With Newsletters

Extend your content with a winning email strategy

For publishers, the effort that goes into creating dynamic, quality content isn't a short-term game. The goal is to always convert casual visitors into committed subscribers. This means content must not only be quick to load, but easily accessible across all platforms.

An email newsletter is a great extension of your site's content that puts the experience back in the hands of readers. After all, users prefer to read and consume content on their own time in familiar interfaces, like Gmail. Data shows that 81% of small and medium businesses rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel. It isn't just a great idea for small businesses either — 49% of consumers say they wouldn't mind regularly receiving a promotional email from a brand they like.

But what makes a successful email campaign? According to Campaign Monitor, these are the averages you want to be seeing:

While these benchmarks may seem low at first glance, the remarkable upside to email marketing is its ability to reach a targeted audience. The users that are willing to take the extra clicks to interact with your campaign are more likely to take further steps to continue engaging with your brand. This makes content strategy around emails even trickier. Content creators need to ensure they're curating the right content for emails to maximize audience attention.

At RebelMouse, we recommend a newsletter strategy that breathes new life into your most relevant and popular articles to increase the consumption of even more content. Here's how it works.

A Winning Newsletter Strategy: Axios

RebelMouse is proud to have launched some of the biggest new media companies to date, including Axios. The news publisher has mastered the art of the newsletter, shattering industry standards with their daily email updates. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, out of the 10 million unique monthly visitors that visit their site, Axios has 1.5 million non-unique subscriptions across all 19 of their newsletters.

One way Axios is able to do this is through their daily campaigns, Axios AM and Axios PM, which feature the latest top stories of the previous 12 or so hours. Here's what's unique about their daily emails:

  • You Don't Have to Click Every Headline: Each story is summarized so the reader doesn't have to leave their email interface to get the whole story. There are, however, CTAs that allow you to go in-depth on a topic, share it to social, and/or read supplemental content. This strategy allows readers to spend more time reading the email, clicking through only when they're already engaged with a subject.
  • The Newsletters Are Stored on Site: Axios features its "Newsletter" section in the top navigation of their site. It's there that full browser versions of every email are archived and available to read at any time. This means page views and traditional web traffic data can be captured on newsletter content.

Replicate This Content Flow on RebelMouse

RebelMouse's CMS makes creating a newsletter content workflow like Axios easy to create and maintain. Our Entry Editor has functionality that can turn any post into a newsletter. So whether it's crafting daily, weekly, or even monthly emails, each newsletter can be created to replicate the experience of an article page.

By converting a RebelMouse post into a newsletter, you'll automatically get a browser version and a post permalink for the article. This means you can capture page view data and keep an easy-to-read archive of every newsletter in a dedicated section, very similar to Axios' method.

Modernize Your Email Strategy With RebelMouse

RebelMouse's Newsletter dashboard makes it easy for you to set up and manage your newsletters to keep audiences engaged with your content. We offer out-of-the-box Mailchimp, Sailthru, and WhatCounts integrations so you can customize the frequency of how often you contact your subscribers, and we make it easy to maintain your third-party email groups, lists, and template designs.

If you want to update your email marketing campaigns to grow a more loyal readership, request a proposal today and let's start working together. If you already publish on RebelMouse, email support@rebelmouse.com if you need help setting up your newsletters.

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NEW! AMP Only for Mobile: Global and per Post Control

It's become very evident how much having Google AMP enabled weighs in on a site's PageSpeed Insights score.

Because of this, we've made it even easier for users to enable and disable AMP-only mobile post pages. This means that your site's post pages will always render the AMP version when accessed through a mobile device.

You can see a live example of this on our founder and CEO's LGBTQI+ site.

Check out the images below to see how you can control both the global output and override it per post as needed. Here is where you control the global output in our Layout & Design tool:

And here's how to toggle it on or off in Entry Editor:

If you have any questions about this feature, email support@rebelmouse.com.

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NEW: Page Views per Particle Enabled for Google AMP

Increase mobile page views for every particle using Google AMP

RebelMouse has deployed an exciting update: We've enabled particle tracking in Google Analytics for articles using Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format, which means every particle now triggers a page view event upon scroll. Before, just one page view event would be logged when the mobile page initially loaded.

Not Familiar With What This Means? Read On

The days of static, flat media are over. Sites with low performance scores, obtrusive ad experiences, and poor content structure simply won't make it. Knowing these truths, the way we think of an article can no longer be static either.

An article today now takes several forms: short-form, long-form, listicle, slideshow, etc. Because of this, we've created a simple framework called Particle Assembler that accounts for all possibilities when building out content.

We playfully call each piece of your content a "particle," which is quite literally a "part" of an "article." These particles have become the core way to author content on RebelMouse, and are standalone elements that use their own imagery, title, and copy. For example, let's say you create a post that's titled, "3 Reasons Why Yoga is Great for Mental Health." Each reason in this article will have a lead image, multi-media, and a description. Each of these reasons, now turned into particles, contain enough information to stand by themselves as individual posts.

Building particles in RebelMouse's Entry Editor.

And they do stand alone successfully when you're on RebelMouse — each particle can be shared separately on social and each will register as a unique page view thanks to our latest update. This is a critical part of our modern pageview methodology that ensures our publishers deliver an elegant user experience to readers while still capitalizing on a meaningful monetization strategy. For instance, not only is every particle now a page view on Google AMP, but it's also a new revenue opportunity. This is thanks to the various placement opportunities for ads we offer within our Particle Assembler. For example, you can set it up so an ad is shown every few particles in a slide show, maximizing for revenue and user engagement.

ICYMI, Google AMP is the search engine's lightning-fast mobile experience. With this update, sites powered by RebelMouse will not only deliver the best AMP experience to their users, but they'll also earn the page views their content deserves, too.

See the Massive Difference

In just a short period after implementing this change, one client experienced a massive spike in AMP pages per user, where it jumped from 1.6 to 8.2:

Here's what their AMP pages per user looked like just prior to the update:

If you're interested in experiencing this type of growth and getting more page views for your mobile content, request a proposal today and let's start working together. If you're already on RebelMouse, email support@rebelmouse.com or talk to your account manager to learn more about particle views for Google AMP.

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