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Are You Doing Enough to Monetize Your Website’s Content?

We live in the age of social where Facebook and Google dominate online ads, search, and traffic. If your corporate blog is stuck on an old paradigm, you're being left in the dust. But if your site generates ample traffic and has a loyal audience, your content is valuable and monetizable.

In today's digital world, content consumption and $$$ opportunity goes beyond the website. The question is, are you doing enough to monetize your website everywhere audiences are discovering your content? Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Follow the Data

Publishers have been trained to plan desktop first for site design, layout, and monetization, leaving mobile as an afterthought. But if you look at your site's statistics and Google Analytics, chances are that the majority of your audience engages almost entirely via mobile. Whether you're going all-in on programmatic, selling native ads, or promoting subscriptions, understanding your data should be the first step prior to making any decisions about your monetization strategy.

2. Find Your Distributed Audience

As you dig deeper with data, you'll likely also discover that a good chunk of your content discovery is happening off-site — via social, search, and email newsletters. And guess what? Platform leaders have been busy creating native content formats like Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP to optimize the experience for content consumers. These formats are not only designed to enhance the user experience, but publishers can now incorporate ads that, in most cases we've seen, perform better than your on-site ads.

3. A/B Test and Optimize Your Ad Experience

Incorporating different ad partners and formats into your pages will be a given. However, you want to be flexible, test placements, and optimize without switching your entire site setup every time. Being able to easily create and A/B test different articles, sections, and home page layouts with the ad experience saves time and allows you to be smart about expanding your monetization approach.

4. Don't Go Overboard

You may be tempted to pepper ads everywhere on your site because more ads means more money, right? But more ads can actually hurt your bottom line by:

  1. Weighing down your pages
  2. Decreasing how fast your content loads
  3. Creating banner blindness for less ad effectiveness, and/or
  4. Simply annoying users to the point where they prematurely leave your site

Strategically use rule-based ad serving and lazy-loading controls to manage when and where ads load, ensuring ads are well aligned with the editorial experience.

Do you have the technology to help you manage ads efficiently? As a next-generation CMS, RebelMouse comes pre-wired with the tools and services to effectively manage monetization and the ad experience on and off-site.

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Particle Assembler: Ads in Slideshows Now Supported

You can now insert ads between slides in a slideshow!

Monetizing users' engagement and page views is pivotal to most digital businesses, and our Particle Assembler has been an invaluable tool in helping RebelMouse clients to insert native ads seamlessly into their content. Now we've taken this functionality one step further by introducing support for ads between slides in Assembler's slideshow layout.

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Inside RebelMouse’s Quality Assurance Operations

How We've Perfected Stress-Free Publishing

At RebelMouse, we like to refer to our enterprise publishing platform as "lean tech." Most publishers have a natural inclination to start doubling down on teams of developers who try to build unique experiences to help stand out above the noise. But they should actually be doing the opposite: Lean tech is the preferred way to cut through content saturation. By allowing RebelMouse to obsess over your product, content producers, editors, managers, and everyone in between can focus on creating quality content and taking advantage of opportunities to leverage distributive publishing strategies that create real revenue growth.

One of the major reasons we're able to maintain a lean tech environment is thanks to our approach to quality assurance (QA). We make updates to our platform daily to ensure our clients always have access to the most robust, high-performing, and secure version of our platform. Behind the scenes, this means having a solid QA structure that's efficient, creates less bugs, and catches the ones that do pop up before they go live. It's a system of checks and balances that's hard and costly to replicate on a custom CMS. Here's a glimpse into how it works.

Our Tech Stack Toolbox

  • Cucumber
  • Java
  • Junit
  • Maven
  • Selenium WebDriver
  • TeamCity
  • Zalenium (Selenium Grid)

Our Checks and Balances Workflow

Automated Regression Testing Cycle

The Lifecycle of a Product Update

When an update is first made to RebelMouse, TeamCity immediately triggers the start of automated tests to review integrity.

TeamCity Build

TeamCity Agent

The tests run in parallel on TeamCity's Build Agent. Next, Zalenium creates docker containers with browsers that matches the count of parallel threads. An Allure report is then generated from the test results, which shows the state of the application after the update.

Allure Report Pass

If a test doesn't complete successfully, the testing framework receives a video with a failed test and attaches it to the Allure report.

Allure Report Issue

Based on the report analysis, a QA specialist will create a "bug" ticket in our product management software to address the issue if needed. Then, information about the bug is immediately sent to the project manager and we begin the process of correcting the problem.

The media powerhouses we power can publish with confidence knowing that any product issues that arise are met with a tried-and-true process to fix the problem with little-to-no disturbance to their workflow. If you have any questions about this process, please email support@rebelmouse.com.

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The Difference Between Subdomains and Subfolders

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder.

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder. This is a choice your team will have to make as you replatform and optimize your content, so it's important to understand the distinction between the two.

Subdomains

A subdomain is a subdivision of an existing domain: For example, apis.rebelmouse.com (subdomain of rebelmouse.com) and hub.united.com (subdomain of united.com) are both examples of subdomain structures. Launching a subdomain on RebelMouse is simple and straightforward for your tech team, and usually doesn't entail much extra work.

Subfolders

Creating a subfolder is a bit different. A subfolder is a URL structure such as FSAStore.com/learn. It's easier to think of subfolders as subsections of your site. This work generally takes about 10 service hours for our team to configure for you.

To launch a new property using a subfolder setup, RebelMouse provides you with technical strategy, direction, and advice on how to configure it properly. For search engine optimization purposes (SEO), using subfolders is the most optimal setup, but the SEO improvement can be minor. As long as the content on the main domain and subdomain interlink, there's not much to worry about if you need to use a subdomain setup. We accomplish the correct connections between both through JSON and feed integrations.

If you have any questions about the difference between subdomains and subfolders, email support@rebelmouse.com.

Related Posts vs. Posts in Assembler

Here's the difference between Related Posts and Posts in Assembler.

By using Related Posts and Posts in Assembler, you can help your audience stay engaged with your site's content and generate more traffic. Both of these features can be added to any post through Entry Editor.

When creating or editing a post, you can add a Related Posts section to the bottom of it that consists of a selection of existing posts on your site that you choose to surface. Only the main image and content headline are pulled, along with a link to the original post. This is similar to the Around the Web section that also shows up at the end of your post when you enable it from the SEO tab of Entry Editor.

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