Case-study GadgetSpeak
How do you get front page ranking on search engines and one million visitors a year on a zero marketing budget? CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT - and a little accessibility for good measure. At the forefront of the blogging revolution GadgetSpeak - the online magazine written by members for members - has done just that.
The Strategy
To set up a magazine where any members of the public can review their gadgets. The articles are moderated to ensure nothing inflamatory hits the screen!
What YellowHawk did
URL : www.gadgetspeak.com
What YellowHawk provided:
| Graphic design |  |
|---|---|
| Application design | |
| Hosting | |
| Email/web-mail | |
| SurveyBox | |
We designed and set-up up an on-line magazine where any member of the public can write an article about gadgets. Features include :
- membership administration
- article search
- members community blog
- article writing by members
- integration with affiliate marketing schemes and Google Adsense
- automatic 'top-10' monthly article list
- 5x5 and 'highly commended' smiley awards
- competitions
- keyword tagging on articles to encourage site browsing
- editorial newsletters
- weekly 'site update' email automatically generated to subscribed members
- special offers
Why YellowHawk?
OK we admit it, this one we designed ourselves for ourselves. It started as an experimental platform with a couple of objectives :
- as a test-bed for new ideas (we've tested out RSS feeds, google site maps, google adsense, blogs and a host of other ideas on GadgetSpeak before bringing them to our customers)
- as a learning exercise on what brings visitors to sites
- as an example of what we can do - most of our clients sites are for closed communities
- and if course to have a little fun!
Outcome
Quite a success for an experiment :
- GadgetSpeak reviews often ranked on the first page of search engine results
- It's now attracting around one million visitors a year.
- Over 1500 reviews in the last 5 years - around one a day
Day to day management of the site is provided by a couple of free-lance journalists who also provide a bulk of the content.
"We are astounded by the success of this site. It shows that passion and content
can compete with marketing spend any day. Our regular top page ranking on all good
search engines, and an ever growing fan base prove that technology, content, design
and accessibility are way up there with good looks and optimisation."
Peter Wilson, Yellowhawk Director