How to win online - free

The Media Standards Trust have announced that their journalisted website has received over 100,000 unique visitors in September, eight months after launch. That's more visitors that Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale or the Press Gazette.

It's a fantastic achievement, particularly given their total promotion budget of £150. So how did they do it?

The 'build it and they will come' strategy is used too often by organisations with websites. Too little thought is given to reaching out to new users.

Why did it work for Journalisted?:

1. volume of content - the site has over 1,000,000 pages and;
2. a long tail - each page doesn't have a lot of readers but cumulatively it works
3. unique content - they are providing info on journalists where little else works
4. combined, this means good search engine optimisation with most of their pages 1 or 2 on Google
5. their A-Z index also helps search engines explore the site
6. no 'empty pubs' - no page is dependent on a volume of readers
7. regular updates delivering repeat business - evidenced by 70% of readers 'favouriting' the site