Illustrated London News has a 170 year history as a content and print company. Recently we made the obvious move to bring one of our print publications online - PODIUM an intelligent view of sport.

Our major articles are in-depth interviews with sports stars, our commentary is from globally renowned pundits and we often do our own photo shoots. Cover stars so far have been Usain Bolt and Frankie Dettorri. Other Articles have focused on Golf, F1, The All Blacks, horse racing and the 2012 Olympics.

On the face of it, that sounds like an SEO's dream – rich, unique content that search engines will love. It's a pity that does not help us one little bit.

Am I going to get Search Engine traffic for "Usain Bolt" on a brand new website? To beat his own website, his sponsor Puma, the BBC or The Guardian? Not a chance.

So I decided to abandon the un-loyal scraps of long-tail search and to Design for Social

This is the tale of what I did to grow traffic for www.thepodiummagazine.com/ when SEO wasn't a viable option. There is still a lot more to do, but I think we have learned enough that it's worth sharing, for the attitude, strategy and outcomes so far.

By engaging people in a social context, we can keep them coming back with each release and create own our own traffic streams and marketing channels outside of Google and search engines.

WHAT DOES DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEAN?

PODIUM Version 1 with Facebook given equal weight as a web article
 

We had a clear strategy to leverage Social from Day One

1. Only the best goes online

I chose to put less online. Only the best articles, and pieces we thought would spark debate, made it online. This means we didn't water down the user experience – readers only get the good stuff. Where Search would say "Stick everything online and pray for longtail" I believe the mantra for Social is "Don't bore me. Blow me away!".

2. Twitter is for the Insider's View

Twitter would be owned by the Print Editor, (Andy @sportingpodium). This means we have a highly knowledgeable sporting writer who is able to engage online with the people we cover. When you cover Usain Bolt and your writers are guys like F1's David croft, getting them to retweet your coverage of them IS your Twitter strategy.

This is a virtuous circle of promotion, everybody taking part wins. Build this into your products and you have a marketing beast.

3. Facebook is for Debate

For Facebook, we decided to pick the most contentious article each edition and put it behind a like wall on Facebook.

The article would sit on the site homepage, looking like an article, but when clicked on, would take people to the Facebook page. Our hope is that people will debate these articles on our Facebook page, thereby taking advantage of Facebook Edgerank, to make these articles pop up into everyone's feeds.

4. It's all one product concept = better use of time and energy

This meant we could cut down our energy expenditure on where we were trying to funnel people. Instead of diluting our energy trying to get people to Facebook, Twitter and the Website, we focus on the website and allow the strategy and mechanisms built into our use of Twitter and Facebook to naturally accrue users on those platforms.
 

WHAT WE LEARNT

PODIUM Version 2 with Twitter and Facebook taking pride of place

5. Do more of what is successful

By the time we got round to Version 2, we found that Twitter was a steady audience builder. We wanted to promote Twitter in the same way as Facebook. We didn't do that by slapping a Twitter button onto the webpage.

In the new design, we made Twitter and a Facebook a living part of the website. Social is not an afterthought, the website is now a Social Content Delivery Mechanic.

6. Not everything succeeds

Facebook is hard for us and we haven't cracked creating the conversation there yet. This is partly due to the exciting rigours of turning print writers into digital writers. But each success that we do make, in traffic spikes and twitter followers, builds a stronger and stronger internal business case to pursue this route with other titles.

7. Jump on every opportunity

This means monitor your Analytics daily! We need to turn every scrap of attention into engagement. To do this you need to react quickly.

The debate piece

The first spike was a forum that had picked up our F1 piece, which certainly provoked some controversy.

I read their discussion and realised I could add something to it, so joined the forum and posted. This engagement kept the debate going, drove more traffic to the site and means we can go back in future and promote other F1 stories.

Note: I posted openly and clearly as Podium, clarifying a point without appearing spammy.

The Wow! Piece

I saw this traffic spike in the Analytics and tracked it back to the artist's Dribbble page. He had created a Pixorama for us to illustrate a story and linked to us from his Dribble account to say it was going to be in the Magazine shortly

This was not going to appear online but when I saw it and the traffic it was generating to our site from Dribbble, I knew it had to go on the site. I'm sure it is going to turn into awesome linkbait. 

8. Partnerships = Win

This comes in two forms

Firstly, competitions for partners help us drive traffic but also allow us to make connection with brands in a scenario in which our first interaction is that we help them

Secondly, as we write our own, exclusive content with major stars, we can share some of it with another website. They will send traffic and link to us to read the full article. Sharing your unique content is something that would be hard to do if you had your SEO hat on, but in the social world, its fine.

As long as you have mechanisms set up to capture that visiting traffic on Facebook and Twitter, you are building your long term marketing channel. 

9. Tools help

We learnt what generated buzz and discussion and tried to work that into our future thinking. F1 has a crazy community!

A tool like Followerwonk would be heresy to traditional print journalists as a means for deciding who is newsworthy, but it can now become part of our process in choosing who to cover, and who to talk to about specific sporting articles. 

Followerwonk allows you to see the most influential people who have a keyword in their bios.
 

IN CONCLUSION

We still have a ton to do. But we have great, unique content at our disposal and real subject matter experts to create our conversations.

Long term, I am sure (and relieved) that the traffic we have seen and the community we are building will be a much better investment of our time and scarce resources than pure SEO.