Back in 2009 we launched the ExCapite Blog.
An experimental platform for testing (and mostly debunking) the most popular theories on how digital was so very different from Print and Electronic Media
By Mid-2011 it was ranked by Alexa as one of the Top 0.5% Websites in the world
This is what we learnt from the 5 years we spent on social media driving traffic to our blog
Rule 1. You can't beat the law of Zipfluence.
20% of your post will drive 80% of your traffic...
and 20% of those 20% will drive 64% of your traffic
The digital economy is bound to the laws of the long tail
The economics of zipfluence
Rule 2. Growth is a game of Memes and Annuities
A post that pops on Social Media is a meme. A momentary spike in traffic
A high page rank on Google or an email subscription is the annuity. It is bankable growth.
Don't confuse the adrenaline rush of a spike in social media popularity with sustainable growth
The trick is to create content that is both memeable and searchable
This is relatively easy because both Social and Google prefer pictures to words
Rule 3. Growth is non-linear.
More importantly, although it is very easy to write for Google, it is very hard to predict which posts will pop on social media
It is a random walk.
The trick is to keep mixing it up.
Experiment, Experiment, Experiment...
Even when you have discovered what works for the audience you have attracted
Rule 4. The persistence of memory.
One of the most important experiments we ran was to map the decline in value of the Google annuity after we stopped typing
To our surprise, even though we stripped the blog back to just the top 20 most posts these blog posts have continued to receive search and social traffic for the past 7 years
However it should be noted this traffic has faded over time as the currency of the subject matter faded into memory
Rule 5. Resist the temptation to create more noise
Focus on generating a signal that breaks through the noise
How do you do this? Make sure your brand stands for one thing
Link your brand with an adjective
Everything you create should fall under that one adjective and you should adhere to that absolute measure of simplicity
So growth hacking can be reduced to a simple question: Your brand = ?... does the content you are about to publish reflect and reinforce this?
If not. Don't post... no matter how entertaining or memeable you think it is
Till next time…