[Build Backlinks Online] 11 Marketing Survival Lessons Learned from Accidentally Enraging an Island City-State

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '11 Marketing Survival Lessons
Learned from Accidentally Enraging an Island City-State'

Posted by DannyDover
My initial response to the massive traffic increase was not exactly
professional.


"HOLY FREAKING CRAP BALLS!", I blurted out. I searched the room for a fellow
nerd to share my e-thusiasm with, but only found a room full of strangers eating
sandwiches.






Over the course of the next few days, the post received more than 600,000
unique visitors. If you segment the traffic to only include visits from
Singapore, the number of unique visitors is equivalent to 10% of the entire
population of the country (although admittedly this metric is a bit inflated due
to people reading the post on multiple devices.)

Some context

I support myself financially as a storytelling consultant. On a day-to-day
level this means I work on marketing strategy, creative writing, and web
development. Admittedly it is a weird mix, but I enjoy the lifestyle.


I am currently living in Vietnam, but recently spent two months living in
Singapore.


Like I do with all of my travels, I penned a blog post about my experience
living in Singapore and hit publish. You can read the entire post here, but the
quick summary is:

Singapore has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time.
I am deeply concerned that the societal and cultural costs of these
accomplishments are harming the populace (I cited concerning data points related
to stress).
I have limited time and resources, and will not be returning to Singapore.

My blog is fairly well read, so I was surprised that this post started out as
one of my least-read posts. After a few days the post was, for most intents and
purposes, just another link in the archive.


Last Wednesday, I grabbed my normal Vietnamese breakfast (a local sandwich
called a Bnh m and a coconut milk-based smoothie) and went into my co-working
office to start on my to-do list for the day.


I have been trying to convert bad online habits into good ones, so when I
found myself craving a peek at Facebook, I clicked on my Google Analytics
shortcut instead. It opened up my real-time report, and I practically dropped my
meal.

Marketing lessons learned

The next few days were the craziest marketing adventure that I have ever had.
The following are the key lessons I learned from this experience:

1. Honesty is power

I think the key reason that this post resonated with people was that it was
uncommonly honest. (This is a trait I picked up from Rand when I worked at Moz.
It isn't a marketing trait, it is a life trait.) This post was published on my
personal blog where I don't have any ads or up-sells. I write posts there solely
because I enjoy writing. In this case, I thought I had some interesting insights
about Singapore and wanted to share my honest thoughts. The power in this was
that when people read it, they too wanted to share my thoughts (along with their
own!) with their online friends.

2. Be conscious of the clickstream

In the post I cited some suicide statistics that were quite alarming. As the
thousands of comments about the post came in (mostly via Facebook), I
continually received the criticism that my data was incorrect. I triple-checked
my sources (they checked out) and tried to reply to as many of the false claims
of bad data as possible. It wasn't until two days later that I realized that
people Googling the statistics were taken straight to a Wikipedia article that
listed outdated data. After I updated the Wikipedia article to include the most
recent data, the data criticism comments immediately stopped. I could have saved
myself a giant headache if I had just viewed the situation from the readers'
perspective and found the misinformation on Wikipedia earlier.

3. Be a first-responder

As the comments came in, I was alerted (rudely and repeatedly) that I had
erroneously cited a date as 2011 rather than 2001. My first thought was just to
subtly update the number but was worried this might start a backlash. For this
reason, I called Jessica Dover. Jessica has worked on social media strategy for
many of the world's most well known celebrities and has solved more social media
problems than I have followers. (Disclaimer: She also happens to be my sister,
but I honestly think that has hindered her more than helped her :-p. Her success
is hard-earned and her own.) Without hesitation, she told me exactly what to do.

Publicly thank the readers for all of their feedback.
Acknowledge that you are listening to them.
Acknowledge the error and then actually fix it.

This strategy worked wonders. I fixed my mistake and the amount of comments on
the blog post quadrupled (after the audience was reassured that I was listening
and responding). Huge win!

If you don't have your own social media mentor like Jessica, Moz's Q&A can be
a great source of information.

4. Patch the holes in your net

At the onset, I was receiving a lot of traffic but none of it was converting
(my conversion events were email captures and social follows). When I couldn't
fix this myself, I called another member of my marketing SWAT team, Joe Chura.
Joe runs an agency called Launch Digital Marketing. I think they are the most
underrated team in the industry. In no time, they had a plan. Following their
advice I installed two WordPress plugins:

MailChimp for WordPress Lite: There are lots of plugins that add MailChimp to a
WordPress site but this is the only one that I know of that adds an opt-out
check box below your comment reply box. If your readers are already entering
their e-mail address in order to leave a comment, they might as well be asked if
they want to sign up for your newsletter. For the text box, I used the text "I
want to be kept up-to-date on Life Listed and receive free resources!"
Flare: This is my favorite social media sharing plugin (there are countless
other options). This version is technically no longer under active development
(they are building a new version to replace it), so I had disabled it on my
site. Launch convinced me to re-add it.

After I added these plugins, it doubled the size of my mailing list and
started what eventually became a viral spread of the blog post on Twitter. These
were huge wins. (Hat tip to Dan Andrews for being at the forefront of that
Twitter storm.)


Again, if you don't have your own marketing SWAT team, Moz's Q&A can be a
great resource.

5. If you have to think about server optimization, it is too late

Throughout the entire process my server never went down. I credit this to two
things:


First, props to WPengine (my host) for being seamless. They handled the spike
without any hiccups or annoying interruptions. I will likely have to pay an
overage fee but that is a MUCH better option than having a site outage.


Second, I credit preparation. I have long been using a tool called
http://gtmetrix.com/ to diagnose speed problems on my site. (Hat tip to Jon over
at Raven for introducing this tool to me). I love this tool because it combines
the Google Page Speed tool and Yahoo's YSlow into one convenient and easy to
understand interface. Luckily, I had implemented all of the recommended fixes
well before this traffic spike. I am kind of a speed optimization nerd. :-p

6. Take comfort in the negativity slope

When I first posted the blog post, no one cared. When it started to gain some
traction, I was immediately told how stupid it and I were. As it gained momentum
the amount of naysayers increased. It wasn't until the post reached full
velocity that the supporters started to outnumber the naysayers. This has been a
trend that I have observed with all of my successful content. I now take comfort
in knowing that it is going to get worse until it suddenly gets better.
Negativity online is a slope, and luckily it does have a peak.

7. Facebook's walled garden is much worse than it was before

Facebook once offered a tool called Facebook Insights for Domains. This tool
allowed you to get valuable information on any traffic that was referred to your
verified domain from Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook has killed it off. When
my post went viral on Facebook, I had no visibility other than that the traffic
was coming from Facebook and Facebook mobile. I had no idea what pages or groups
the applicable conversations were happening on, and thus had no way to respond
to conversations happening behind the wall. This was a huge frustration
throughout the whole process.

8. A rising tideâ

When people came to my website to read the Singapore post, many of them
checked out my other posts as well (this is to be expected). In response to
this, I published a post that I thought would also be applicable to the new
readers. Due to the increased visibility, this post (on useful money
philosophies) subsequently went mildly viral. This in turn drove even more
conversions.

9. Be aware of parallel universes

Stories exist in parallel universes:

What the storyteller experiences
The story the storyteller shares
The story as the audience members understand it

These are all very different stories!


Many of the comments, compliments and criticism that I received about the
Singapore post had absolutely nothing to do with the words written in my
article. For many, it was their personal experiences, not my blog post, that
drove their responses. At first, this was a major frustration point for me. It
wasn't until I mapped out the perspectives in the above list that I calmed down
and started to appreciate the storytelling experience.

10. Listen first, then wait, then react

When the responses came in, I was vastly outnumbered (it was literally 500,000
to 1)! The only way I was able to deal with that amount of volume was to listen,
learn from an expert (see lesson 3), collect data, process that data, and then
react. I let the first several dozen comments come in before I started to
respond. I think this was critical in me being able to follow and supplement the
large-scale discussion.

11. Titles are 60% of the battle

The click-worthiness of the blog post title was a major contributing factor to
its success. (Second only to its honesty). Admittedly it was an
attention-grabbing title but at the same time it was true. I actually will never
be returning to Singapore. I didn't perform any keyword research or A/B tests
when picking the blog post title. Instead, I just picked something that I
figured I would want to click. The best titles are always that simple.


When I look back on this marketing adventure, I feel thankful. The world, not
just Singapore, is in an amazing state of change right now. I am glad that my
little voice was able to contribute a little bit to the global discussion.


If you would like to hear about other marketing adventures, feel free to
connect with me on Google+.
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