Littleredbook.cn; At 6 months old, our digital baby has learned to walk.

Rand ⋅ China Social Media, Interactive, News ⋅ 7 comments

Littleredbook is 6 months old, and I want to take a brief moment to pull the spotlight away from China’s social media landscape and briefly shine it on LRB. So what have we accomplished in 6 months?

My initial goal was to show up on the top of Google for the search term “China Advertising”; among other things, this would be a signal that our content driven SEO strategy was working, and would also, by the grace of the Google gods bestow upon my humble agency, BA360,  some more business.

Did I reach that goal? Well as many of you probably guessed, the answer is yes, because if it wasn’t yes, then this would be a pretty depressing post.

Looks like we’re coming in under Danwei, and above AdAgeChina. I’m not going to celebrate quite yet, as LRB isn’t number one and Google is a fickle, fickle mistress; our ranking will likely bounce around in the days to come. But lets leave that for another day and explore this question: how did we get to number 2 for our preferred search term?

Pretty simple really – it was all based on content; great content is like a giant magnet that pulls in the online success you seek. A caveat – we did not force our content into a preset SEO optimized keyword-rich articles… no. To me SEO rules change so often to render optimization on par with voodoo. Yes you should get your meta tags, and headlines done correctly, yes you should make sure your site is on the major search engine’s radars, but as far as content goes – the key is relevant, interesting, and original, followed by quantity – this pushed LRB to its PR 4, and 6k/month visits within these first 6 months.

The future goal of course is to expand on these numbers and grow our readership; we’re doing this actively by teaming up with other agencies and advertising sites to produce a mutually beneficial result for all involved. Also, while in the beginning we did complement LRB with a number of SNS offshoots; our efforts seemed to have reached the point where the site grows on its own (our baby is learning to walk) and further marketing isn’t required – the system runs itself.

Pray tell, what’s next?
We’re applying insights from LRB, as well as client projects to launch another B2C in-house project. I’ll not discuss it yet – but initial traffic estimates show we’re on the right track:

10 days… 20,000 visits.

This site is a Chinese B2C site, vs. LRB’s Western B2B focus – which partly explains the dramatic difference in traffic; however, by strictly focusing on a content driven strategy, along with social media advertising, we’re able to get these results within the first 10 days of launch. Our focus now is only branding and retention of visitors; we’ll build the vehicle for conversions in another phase.

Keep in mind this is a completely unknown website, with no previous support, and we spent nothing on banner ads, or PPC advertising (which would increase traffic but at a huge increase in costs), plus this was done as a low-priority project in-house (clients always come first). The point? Apart from “social media marketing works”, I’d have to say critical ingredients are key… content is king.

Could I show you better numbers? Client confidentiality agreements prevent me from doing so. Therefore these in-house projects hopefully serve to give mini-evidence that LRB’s team (and by extension, BA360) understands both B2C and B2B online advertising, for both Western and Chinese markets, in addition to advertising in China in general.

Not convinced? No worries, I’ll be following up with little case studies in the future when applicable, and will reveal our “secret” in-house project’s numbers sometime late this year. Finding agencies that understand online advertising for both Chinese and Western markets is not impossible… though it is rare. Am I blatantly self-promoting myself and BA360 with this post? Contact me with your project brief and marketing budget to find out.