Adkom.Media

By Joshua|2022-08-02T21:47:21-05:00August 2nd, 2022|Web|

Adkom Media

I was working for Blip/Adkom for several months and waiting for our series B funding so I could afford the talent I would need to build a new website for Adkom. The previous website was such a disaster the brand couldn’t wait any longer. As the financing markets changed considerably in May, I decided to do it almost entirely in-house.

I held a kickoff call in the first week of June 2022. On the team, we had:

My marketing intern
A copy/content writer
A designer
A HubSpot automation expert

I usually prefer to use WordPress, but since HubSpot was the center of our data world, I wanted to give the CMS a try because it would keep all of our data and tools in one spot. To my surprise, it provided everything we needed and was very easy to use.

Adkom Media

I was working for Blip/Adkom for several months and waiting for our series B funding so I could afford the talent I would need to build a new website for Adkom. The previous website was such a disaster the brand couldn’t wait any longer. As the financing markets changed considerably in May, I decided to do it almost entirely in-house.

I held a kickoff call in the first week of June 2022. On the team, we had:

My marketing intern
A copy/content writer
A designer
A HubSpot automation expert

I usually prefer to use WordPress, but since Hubspot was the center of our data world, I wanted to give the CMS a try because it would keep all of our data and tools in one spot. To my surprise, it provided everything we needed and was very easy to use.

Screenshot of Adkom.media's home page header and hero image

We quickly banged out copy and built prototypes. Before we knew it we had a home page that we liked. I was introduced to an offshore Hubspot landing page developer and gave him a shot, and he was brilliant. Not only did he perfectly replicate the prototype pixel for pixel, but he did it overnight so that it would be ready for our review in the morning.

This established such a fantastic workflow that we were able to launch the site just seven weeks after the kickoff call, for a total cost of $1,250 for development. Please check out the results: https://adkom.media/. I will share data as it starts to flow.

adkom media home page screen shot bottom

We quickly banged out copy and built prototypes. Before we knew it we had a home page that we liked. I was introduced to an offshore Hubspot landing page developer and gave him a shot, and he was brilliant. Not only did he perfectly replicate the prototype pixel for pixel, but he did it overnight so that it would be ready for our review in the morning.

This established such a fantastic workflow that we were able to launch the site just seven weeks after the kickoff call, for a total cost of $1,250 for development. Please check out the results: https://adkom.media/. I will share data as it starts to flow.

Comments Off

Generation Active

By Joshua|2021-04-07T13:18:02-05:00March 31st, 2021|Web|

Generation Active

I was just promoted to Vice President of Creative and Content and handed the keys to the brand. I decided to launch a consumer facing content hub where we could drive traffic to through our video network’s content and also to activate campaigns and other events.

Besides using the site as a place for our network viewers to visit, I saw a ripe market for fitness content. There are over 100 million queriers for health, fitness, and wellness each year. My strategy is to find streams of heavily searched content and to create “content nets” to try to capture some of those clicks. The cost-per-click on a lot of those search terms was low, which means there was an opening to vastly grow our audience.

My team was already creating video content for our network using well-followed social media influencers. I decided to use a ghostwriter to turn these short 30 second videos into full internet articles that are completely aimed and optimized for key words and subjects that had high volume and a low CPC. By using the video and photo assets and not serving ads, our content delivered a really high quality experience.

Optimizing for SEO was my #1 priority on this project and I took this task up myself. The following is a list of items that I achieved…

A sound technical site structure.
Super fast site speed loading, especially on mobile. Our pages were rich with content and I worked with a with a million plugins, settings, and CDNs to get consistently into the green zone on Google PageSpeed Insights.
Each article was aimed at an heavily searched traffic stream and then was optimized to capture it. I used a tool called Searchmetrics that tapped into Google’s API which gave you previous search data and helped you figure out the secrets that might have won that traffic.
Greatly increase “Page Authority” which I think was the biggest thing holding us back. This was a new site and we needed to establish to Google that we were an authority on fitness and should be ranked like it.

The site was launched on Feb 1st, 2020. Traffic was light at first, but increased exponentially. By the second month we had 35,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately the company crashed as COVID based gym closures killed all of our revenue streams. My team was immediately laid off and the site has laid nearly dormant for over a year now. Below are a few screenshots with comments about my decision making on each…

Generation Active

I was just promoted to Vice President of Creative and Content and handed the keys to the brand. I decided to launch a consumer facing content hub where we could drive traffic to through our video network’s content and also to activate campaigns and other events.

Besides using the site as a place for our network viewers to visit, I saw a ripe market for fitness content. There are over 100 million queriers for health, fitness, and wellness each year. My strategy is to find streams of heavily searched content and to create “content nets” to try to capture some of those clicks. The cost-per-click on a lot of those search terms was low, which means there was an opening to vastly grow our audience.

My team was already creating video content for our network using well-followed social media influencers. I decided to use a ghostwriter to turn these short 30 second videos into full internet articles that are completely aimed and optimized for key words and subjects that had high volume and a low CPC. By using the video and photo assets and not serving ads, our content delivered a really high quality experience.

Optimizing for SEO was my #1 priority on this project and I took this task up myself. The following is a list of items that I achieved…

A sound technical site structure.
Super fast site speed loading, especially on mobile. Our pages were rich with content and I worked with a with a million plugins, settings, and CDNs to get consistently into the green zone on Google PageSpeed Insights.
Each article was aimed at an heavily searched traffic stream and then was optimized to capture it. I used a tool called Searchmetrics that tapped into Google’s API which gave you previous search data and helped you figure out the secrets that might have won that traffic.
Greatly increase “Page Authority” which I think was the biggest thing holding us back. This was a new site and we needed to establish to Google that we were an authority on fitness and should be ranked like it.

The site was launched on Feb 1st, 2020. Traffic was light at first, but increased exponentially. By the second month we had 35,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately the company crashed as COVID based gym closures killed all of our revenue streams. My team was immediately laid off and the site has laid nearly dormant for over a year now. Below are a few screenshots with comments about my decision making on each…

These are examples of a standard content page. By partnering with well followed influencers we were not only building great content, but we were also trading links to their sites. This back linking strategy is why I think we were gaining so much momentum.

When producing a content shoot, I would make sure that the footage would work for both for our video network and the website. This greatly cut down on cost.

We headed each article with a looping 5second video at the top of the page. I felt that this gave the page “life” while quickly disseminated what the page was about to the viewer. The copy for each of these pages was written in Searchmetric’s tool to make sure it was pre-optimized for capturing as many clicks as possible.

The video that played on our network sat at the bottom of the page. I would have liked to look at more data to see if this was the right spot on the page.

As for organization, research pointed towards three types of health and wellness consumption: Nutrition, Workouts, and Inspiration. Workouts and Nutrition were winning most of the hits, though Inspiration I felt has some of the best stories. I would have liked to tweak that term and figure out how to best send people to that tab.

The site was launched on Feb 1st, 2020. Traffic was light at first, but increased exponentially. By the second month we had 35,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately the company crashed as COVID based gym closures killed all of our revenue streams. My team was immediately laid off and the site has laid nearly dormant for over a year now.

These are examples of a standard content page. By partnering with well followed influencers we were not only building great content, but we were also trading links to their sites. This back linking strategy is why I think we were gaining so much momentum.

When producing a content shoot, I would make sure that the footage would work for both for our video network and the website. This greatly cut down on cost.

We headed each article with a looping 5second video at the top of the page. I felt that this gave the page “life” while quickly disseminated what the page was about to the viewer. The copy for each of these pages was written in Searchmetric’s tool to make sure it was pre-optimized for capturing as many clicks as possible.

The video that played on our network sat at the bottom of the page. I would have liked to look at more data to see if this was the right spot on the page.

As for organization, research pointed towards three types of health and wellness consumption: Nutrition, Workouts, and Inspiration. Workouts and Nutrition were winning most of the hits, though Inspiration I felt has some of the best stories. I would have liked to tweak that term and figure out how to best send people to that tab.

The site was launched on Feb 1st, 2020. Traffic was light at first, but increased exponentially. By the second month we had 35,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately the company crashed as COVID based gym closures killed all of our revenue streams. My team was immediately laid off and the site has laid nearly dormant for over a year now.

Comments Off

Zoom Media

By Joshua|2021-04-06T12:41:25-05:00March 31st, 2021|Web|

ZoomMedia.com

I was hired as the Creative Director at Zoom Media in 2015, I was put in charge of an outdated poorly built website and was tasked to build a simple and easy to understand story for brands to engage with. I quickly deployed a new one-page long scrolling WordPress website. The sequential marketing story was really easy to understand and was deemed a success. Where this design wasn’t effective was in gathering data. The design asked very little clicking from the viewer, so we barely got any useful data from the analytics.

In the second half of 2018 we decided to rebuild the website, and this time build a multi page site where we could gather more data from user clicks. We used the same WordPress and Avada pair because of our team’s familiarity with it.

The hardest part was trying to get our other regions with vastly different products and language to cooperate. French and English Canada was easy because half of my team are French speaking Montrealers. The UK proved to be the hardest to work with, as our language and work cultures were very dissimilar.

It launched in January 2019 and was deemed a success from management. Inbound leads increased by 300% soon after launching. Below are a few screenshots of the now defunct website with comments below…

ZoomMedia.com

I was hired as the Creative Director at Zoom Media in 2015, I was put in charge of an outdated poorly built website and was tasked to build a simple and easy to understand story for brands to engage with. I quickly deployed a new one-page long scrolling WordPress website. The sequential marketing story was really easy to understand and was deemed a success. Where this design wasn’t effective was in gathering data. The design asked very little clicking from the viewer, so we barely got any useful data from the analytics.

In the second half of 2018 we decided to rebuild the website, and this time build a multi page site where we could gather more data from user clicks. We used the same WordPress and Avada pair because of our team’s familiarity with it.

The hardest part was trying to get our other regions with vastly different products and language to cooperate. French and English Canada was easy because half of my team are French speaking Montrealers. The UK proved to be the hardest to work with, as our language and work cultures were very dissimilar.

It launched in January 2019 and was deemed a success from management. Inbound leads increased by 300% soon after launching. Below are a few screenshots of the now defunct website with comments below…

This is the home page with a full width video that autoplays as soon as the viewer hits the page. Zoom Media’s story is really complex and the video at the top was a quick hitting 30 second primer that helped answer any questions and who our audience was. The rest of the page was laid out to tell a sequential story of all of our best selling points to a brand manager or media buyer.

This is the audience page which is the primary reason anybody would buy ads from us. Health club goers have are well educated, enjoy travel and technology, and high HHI. Paired with the fact that their audience can’t skip the commercials makes for a very attractive proposition. I felt this page had a lot of potential to draw organic traffic, so we did lots of SEO research on keywords and had them well represented on the website. We would sponsor Ad Words too with many of these keywords, which converted a decent percentage of clicks.

Success stories and testimonials are always a great way to drive results. We prominently displayed our best stats and large brands on this page.

The “Locations” page was a tool specifically for sales people to send our media buyers too. This wasn’t a page that would get much organic traffic because individual or market coverage isn’t something someone searches for. Instead it was built to answer Media Buyers questions and concerns as quickly as possible and to excite them for Zoom Media to be a way to reach a lot of their audience.

This is the home page with a full width video that autoplays as soon as the viewer hits the page. Zoom Media’s story is really complex and the video at the top was a quick hitting 30 second primer that helped answer any questions and who our audience was. The rest of the page was laid out to tell a sequential story of all of our best selling points to a brand manager or media buyer.

This is the audience page which is the primary reason anybody would buy ads from us. Health club goers have are well educated, enjoy travel and technology, and high HHI. Paired with the fact that their audience can’t skip the commercials makes for a very attractive proposition. I felt this page had a lot of potential to draw organic traffic, so we did lots of SEO research on keywords and had them well represented on the website. We would sponsor Ad Words too with many of these keywords, which converted a decent percentage of clicks.

Success stories and testimonials are always a great way to drive results. We prominently displayed our best stats and large brands on this page.

The “Locations” page was a tool specifically for sales people to send our media buyers too. This wasn’t a page that would get much organic traffic because individual or market coverage isn’t something someone searches for. Instead it was built to answer Media Buyers questions and concerns as quickly as possible and to excite them for Zoom Media to be a way to reach a lot of their audience.

Comments Off

Optimum Ascent

By Joshua|2021-03-31T22:00:59-05:00March 30th, 2021|Web|

Optimum Ascent

In the Fall, I met a NYC-based financial consultant who wanted to build a small niche consultancy specializing in reorganization.. She already hired an old-school copywriter whose expertise is print and hired me to help her launch her digital footprint.

She had a preexisting website on WIX, but wanted much more advanced capabilities like marketing automation and SEO tools that weren’t available on that consumer focused platform. I suggested a move to WordPress and the addition of a CRM to manage data and automation. We decided on the parameters that she was looking for and I was tasked to research which platform to choose. After my investigation, I was down to two: Hubspot and Active Campaign. Hubspot is an amazing product, but we thought that it would take years before we could really take advantage of all the capabilities of that system. ActiveCampaign was easier to deploy and was a fraction of the cost as their competitor. ActiveCampaign won out.

I built the site in November 2020. We were aiming to have everything built and ready to go before she spoke at a large Financial Services conference. Unfortunately because of COVID her talk’s attendance was not good. Furthermore because it was entirely virtual, she wasn’t able to convert many of her attendees into site visits and conversions.

I’m ready to start working on a content marketing strategy, but she needs to close a few deals before we move to the next step of the project.

Comments Off