I was broke and started an online magazine empire that ended up getting over 20 million visitors. Here's what I learned:
I had never ran a business and barely had a job when I started my online magazine. 20 million website visitors and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, here's everything I learned:
This picture is of just a few of the 500 writers who wrote for my online magazine.
I created a movement behind an idea, and the magazines grew at light speed.
If you want to grow a large website, here are some key learnings:
1. Put links inside articles so one page view turns into six “You liked this? Read this next: “ - this works on all blogs, Medium posts etc
For example, if you’re reading this article, I would imagine you would want to tab up the following articles and read them next:
2. You never know what will go viral. Produce as much content as possible- getting a team of writers/editors is a great idea as you scale
3. Have one person in your team dedicated to seeding content on social news/social media for traffic. Was me, then I hired a head of marketing.
Might sound strange for me to do that, but remember I was “CEO” not “growth hacking dude” in the Planet Ivy days.
What this means for you:
The job is only HALF DONE once the content is created: The second half is getting it seen.
Like Gary Vaynerchuk famously said: I spent 10 minutes per day making a video to post on Wine Library, and four hours per day cold messaging people to get them to feature it/shout it out.
4. On a high-traffic website, technology can mess you up - make sure you understand what’s going on at every level of your company, even the bits you outsource for other people to run
5. You will raise investment money if you have a tonne of traction.
Our team was somewhat weak and our product was Wordpress blog(s)
- didn’t matter
- We had 300k visitors a month for investment round one, two million visitors a month investment round two and getting into Techstars. GROWTH IS GOD.
6. Gotta be ballsy.
Things we got for free: Office space (google Campus, then a fucking food bank!), servers (Rackspace startup program), mentorship (via Google Office hours), legal advice, £1k loan from the government (reply helped as was on welfare at the time), and, of course, I lived off the government (rent and £71 a week pocket money), a job would’ve take too much of my energy and focus.
I wanted it bad enough to be poor as fuck, have girlfriend/family annoyed with me, etc. Saying I believe in myself is one thing, standing up and doing all of the above is what separates the King prawns from the baby shrimps.
7. The bigger you get, the bigger target you’re going to have painted on your back for attacks- My advice?
Presume everyone who criticizes you is mentally ill- We had attacks from mainstream newspapers, competitors, redditors, lots of stuff.
We never gave them the satisfaction of responding. I always think of that Eminem lyric “They want me to go on their shows and argue with them ‘cos their ratings stink? Fuck that”
8. Focus on ONE METRIC - Ours was pageviews/uniques. We messed up many other things but did very well because we always had this on fleek throughout our journey
9. It ain’t over until it’s over - We used our assets from the company to turn into a ($10k+ a month) agency overnight
10. “It worked because it had to”
- Building these websites (that ended up having over 20 million visitors) was very stressful BUT because deadlines were all around me, I met them.
As ever: Make big goals, enrol others in your dream, and you just HAVE to do what needs to be done.
Make a promise and keep it no matter what.
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