We bridge the divide between what's possible and what most actually do with the web.
There's now an opportunity to connect with millions of people. But most organizations leave this on the table.
Influence, momentum, traffic, traction, call it what you will; it can't be bought.
The old rules don't apply. You've got to do this right in this connected world.
Ready to get serious about the internet?
Revolver Magazine came to Electric Orange in need of a completely new website. Since Revolver is the leading publication for heavy metal and hard rock music, this was no small undertaking.
Revolver had years and years of content, comments, forum posts, and users in their database. The site was running on Drupal and was desperately in need of a fresh, new design and a better user experience. The site was hard to navigate and Revolver's editors were not happy with Drupal's interface for editing and publishing content.
Electric Orange was excited about all of the possibilities for improvement and delivered a brand new design while migrating all of the old site's content and user base into a completely new site built on Expression Engine. The results have been astounding.
Writing good code is essential to the success of any major website. One of the key things that we did during this project is completely revamp the site's code. We wrote semantic html that gives important metadata to search engines and allows the site to translate well to mobile devices and other platforms. We organized content better so that it became easier to find things. We moved inline styles out of the html and consolidated javascript into external files. This gave the site tremendous performance improvements. When it was all said and done, Revolver was handed a site that is built to last.
One of Revolver's problems was that the editors found it difficult to publish new content to the site in Drupal. This, in turn, made them less likely to post frequently. By focusing on improving the experience of managing content, we gave them a site that they would be more inclined to update. This resulted in more content, which resulted in more traffic and better SEO rankings. We brought clear thinking to how the content should be organized and how that should correlate with the editors' back end.
Everyday Health is the web's leading online health information website. Their network of sites is even larger than Web MD! So, we were excited when they approached us to help launch a new condition blogger program in 2009.
The Everyday Health condition blogger program is a network of over 80 volunteer bloggers that share their experiences of living with various health conditions each week. Here's just one example.
Electric Orange built this program from scratch by recruiting every one of the bloggers and maintaining a relationship with them. We coached the bloggers on best practices for SEO and writing, and we worked with the editors every week to help them find new content to feature in their newsletters, on the homepage, and on Everyday Health's social networking profiles.
The program has been a tremendous success and has created content that's driven hundreds of thousands of pageviews and visits, and has improved Everyday Health's search engine rankings.
One reason that the condition blogging program has been a success is our willingness to be flexible and constantly improve our strategy. We've done everything from publish a weekly newsletter that keeps our bloggers in the loop, to running conference calls on SEO best practices, to brainstorming topics for posts with our bloggers. The challenges change every week, but the one constant month over month is that Electric Orange has kept the Everyday Health condition blogging program running strong.
For a site like Everyday Health having lots of new content is absolutely essential to driving traffic and providing news to distribute through its newsletters, social networking profiles, and to search engines. By recruiting and coaching these condition bloggers, we've become an indispensable part of the site's daily publishing process and added authentic voices to their online community.
For those of you not in NYC, The L Magazine is one of the coolest alt weeklies in the country. They are distinguishable here in New York by their bright orange stands often found near subway entrances.
Their publication started in 2003, and though right in the thick of a declining print publishing environment, The L opted to focus their efforts on their print publication. But by spring of 2009, they were ready to jump with gusto into the web, and Electric Orange was happy to guide them in this process.
The L Magazine had been around for about six years by the time they approached Electric Orange to help them with their website. As you can imagine, they had tons of print content. However, the magazine was doing very little in the way of online publishing. Their old site was centered around a blog on which they published as few as 1-2 posts per day. Besides that blog, the only other portion of the site was dedicated to local event listings in the New York area. Their print publication had an untapped gold mine of content—everything from reviews and features to sex advice! Electric Orange helped The L figure out how to cater their content for both the web and for print. With the internet, your content is only as relevant as your last post, so you better be ready to hold a person's attention if you want to be successful online. We worked with the editorial team to help reorganize content, work on web-friendly headlines, and to adapt their print philosophy towards new media.
Transitioning content from a print publication to a relevant website was something we knew was important, but we also knew that the distribution of this content was equally important. Just as search engines help a new visitor find content, social media sites do the same. During the course of this campaign, Twitter became ever more important to content-driven sites like TheLMagazine.com. We helped them blaze this trail by growing their following and making their Twitter profile become one of the most successful alt weekly profiles on the web.
Webvet, the internet's leading pet health publication, came to us for help improving the SEO ranking of their large archive of content. For a site like Webvet, search traffic is crucial, and a lot of work was needed to whip the site into shape.
As we revised articles and researched keywords to improve the site's search rankings, we also coached their editorial staff on writing for the web. As it turns out, good writing for search engines can be good for your readers too. It's just a matter of being cognizant of how search engines evaluate your site. Many journalism best-practices—strong, clear headlines and lead sentences—are also the stuff that Google loves.
Not only did we focus on improving the SEO ranking of Webvet's content, we also jump-started their social media profiles and turned them into a real source of traffic and referrals.
For a site like Webvet that publishes lots of content in a specific niche, good search engine optimization tactics are not a luxury, they're a matter of survival. So, Webvet came to us to conduct an extensive revamp of their old content and to advise them on how to move forward. We researched an exhaustive list of pet-health-related keywords and revised hundreds of old articles, tweaking headlines, links, text, and metadata. We also coached the editorial staff on best practices for writing articles for the Web so that all of their new content would be more findable as soon as they published it. The positive impact on their search traffic was immediately tangible.
While it might not seem important, the software that you use to publish your content and power your website is crucial. Using a bad content management system can make things difficult for your staff to update, and it can hurt your site's ability to be found and shared. An example is a CMS that generates long, unwieldy urls, or one that locks you into a convoluted information architecture. Webvet knew the pitfalls of a crappy CMS firsthand and was determined to move to a new Drupal CMS setup. Electric Orange recommended drupal and was key in ensuring that this transition was smooth, and that their new Drupal installation was maxed-out with SEO best-practices.
The Cooper Square Hotel, a new boutique hotel that opened in December 2008, needed to ensure that their new site would be representative of the impressive building they were resurrecting on the Bowery. Being a new hotel in a already crowded East Village neighborhood, they wanted to make sure that their site would rank above the competition. Electric Orange was called into action to assist with making sure each aspect of the site was optimized for searches.
We worked with The Cooper Square Hotel to determine exactly who their ideal customer was going to be. We then identified search terms that would work with the copy on the site and would match with what search engines would be indexing on each page. Our research helped make the site one of the prime examples of a solid web presence for the new boutique hotels currently opening up in New York today.
The Cooper Square came to Electric Orange before the hotel had launched when they had no online presence. We understood the importance of making sure that their place of business would be universally recognized when the new hotel opened its doors. If a potential customer was searching for their business and was unable to locate it on the web, it could prove detrimental to their reputation. We assured The Cooper Square Hotel that they would be not only be prominent in searches, but also prominent across other more localized areas such as Google and Yahoo business directories, maps, and other local listings. We made sure to cover each path that a potential customer might take in finding the hotel online.
The Cooper Square Hotel's business is driven primarily by its good reputation and referrals from past customers. We helped facilitate a digital PR program to fortify their traditional PR firm's efforts to get more attention for the hotel leading up to their launch. The program was centered around reaching out to influential local blogs, as well as larger sites like Fodor's and Frommers. This push helped gain not only more traffic to the site, but it also created an organic buzz around the local travel community.
In just two brief years, Northside Festival has become one of New York's anticipated events on the indie rock calendar. Northside Fest is a four-day music, film, and arts festival in North Brooklyn that highlights some of the brightest upcoming and established stars in the independent music scene. It's fast overtaking CMJ Music Marathon as the best live music festival in New York City. Unlike CMJ, the festival is concentrated in a tight geographical area within Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The close proximity of the shows makes the weekend festival very accessible, and the event is a great way to celebrate the scene blossoming in these North Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Northside Festival came to Electric Orange wanting to generate online buzz for the festival. They also wanted to have the festival featured in online publications and blogs to drive ticket sales, build their email list, and grow their social media buzz and followers. To meet these goals we created a comprehensive campaign that hinged on an exciting contest in which we gave away 3 new Apple iPads.
With this campaign, we truly delivered a comprehensive marketing plan at a great price. Our strategy hinged on the iPad Contest to drive new traffic to the site, generate online buzz about the festival, and grow their email list and social media followers. To support the contest we employed a variety of tactics including a street team to collect contest emails in North Brooklyn, online PR that resulted in significant press and buzz, and managing content to grow the festival's social media following. The contest was the underlying theme that united the disparate promotional mediums of PR, offline marketing, social media, and email.
Combining an online marketing campaign with a traditional, offline street team was key to the success of the campaign. Because the festival is held in a specific area of North Brooklyn, Electric Orange recognized that an offline component would be key to success of the campaign. As such, we developed a street team to get out in the neighborhood to collect email addresses, promote ticket sales, and distribute Northside promotional items. This, combined with our online PR efforts, was the lynchpin that made the campaign successful.
This site is near and dear to our hearts since we're musicians and vinyl lovers. Daily Vinyl is our own property that we launched in March 2009. It's part online store for vinyl-only music releases and part music news and reviews site.
We believe that your site can only be as big as the content that you produce and the way that you engage your audience. So we've created a site that combines a clear business model with quality content in a growing niche. We also believe in vinyl as the superior format for building a long-term personal record collection. With Daily Vinyl we are recreating the experience of visiting your local record store and getting to chat with their knowledgeable staff and explore new music on their speakers. Except this time that experience happens online.
We've put our sweat, expertise, and money where our mouth is with Daily Vinyl and our clients benefit from everything we learn by running the site.
Daily Vinyl is a comprehensive example of the type of work we do each and every day for our clients. It's an e-commerce website powered by Shopify. It's a music news and reviews site as well. Daily Vinyl truly embodies our belief that creating good content on your site is necessary to drive your business goals. We also practice all of the marketing techniques on the site—from SEO to social media to digital pr—that we advise clients on every day.
Because we call all the shots at Daily Vinyl we're able to use the site as a great way to test new ideas that can benefit our clients. We're writing content and code on the site every week so if there's a new best practice that we'd like to try out or a marketing technique that we'd like to experiment with, we'll often test it first on Daily Vinyl and then pass along what works to you.
In just two short years EuropeUpClose has gone from a relatively unknown blog to one of the premier destinations for European travel advice online. When they first reached out to Electric Orange their site was relatively young and received most of its traffic from a CPC campaign that their marketing director was running. The site had minimal functionality with a generic blog template and not very much action.
We worked with EuropeUpClose to create a newly designed Wordpress site that would enhance the user experience and help organize some of their already superb content on traveling in Europe. Aside from design, we assisted in establishing their brand online by implementing an aggressive SEO campaign and social media strategy. The result in just one year was astounding. We succeeded at reinventing their brand from a small blog run by a travel agent to an international destination for all people interested in travel to Europe.
When discussing a marketing plan with EuropeUpClose we knew we had a unique opportunity because the content was exceptional. The site was based around the knowledge of a seasoned traveling professional. This gave EuropeUpClose an instant upper hand in becoming the "go-to site" for everyone thinking of traveling to Europe. So aside from using proven tactics like SEO and social media to syndicate content, we knew there was more that we could do. We worked on behalf of EuropeUpClose to find sites in their niche that would feature EruopeUpClose in some way. This enabled the EuropeUpClose brand to be seen across numerous websites both large and small and gave them valuable backlinks. The EuropeUpClose brand would go on to become the Tripbase European Travel Blog of 2009, and their content was featured on notable sites like Everyday Health.
Many clients believe that as long as they have a website and they exist online then there is nothing left to be done. This could not be further from the truth. As the internet constantly evolves, so must your brand. EuropeUpClose understood this, which is why we were hired to handle their online marketing strategy. But at Electric Orange we do not just handle marketing strategy, we look at how everything you are doing online affects your brand.
So although we were not hired to do development and user interface/user experience consulting for their redesign, we soon jumped into that role for the greater good of the site. The same can be said for Twitter and social media practices. When we were first hired, our only objective was to get EuropeUpClose to rank higher in searches. We explained to them that all of these aspects are intertwined—the code, the search strategy, and the social media profiles must all be integrated. Each and every one of these parts need to work in concert to ensure that your site reaches its full potential. From the first month, we were hands-on in all aspects of this young site. At the end of the campaign we were very proud to see that EuropeUpClose had grown its daily visits 3x and had achieved the credibility it deserves.
When New York-based gallery nine5 approached Electric Orange in 2009, they wanted to create a new brand online to sell limited-edition, high-quality prints by established artists. Already a mainstay in the New York art scene, gallery nine5 wanted to distribute their artists' work around the world through an e-commerce site.
So we created a slick looking e-Commerce site where the gallery could sell all of their high-quality prints to anyone, living anywhere. prints995 has become one of the most important print dealers on the web in just a few short months. It has been featured in Daily Candy, Flavorpill, and Curated Magazine, all of which highlight not only prints995's exceptional taste in art, but also the design of their site as well.
We worked closely with gallery nine5 to create a site that looked both minimalist and fresh, a perfect forum for the extravagant artwork they display here on a daily basis. Once the site was built, we began a full marketing program to get the word out and sell prints.
From the beginning, gallery nine5 was an exacting client with high standards. Electric Orange continually met and raised the bar as the project evolved and the site took shape. As firm believers in agile development processes and favoring working html and css over photoshop mocks, Electric Orange showed the flexibility to meet gallery nine5's every need, even as those needs shifted.
When it came time to market the site Electric Orange was hired to conduct SEO and set the its social media strategy. We worked directly with the gallery's staff and interns to teach them best practices for blogging and marketing the site through outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. It's a good thing when the client wants to take the reigns from you and run with the process of creating new content to market their site, and Electric Orange was a proud parent when it came time to remove the training wheels.
Listicles.com is an offshoot of New York alt weekly The L Magazine. The site is the ultimate destination for all types of lists and list articles (listicles). The content on the site is updated daily and has plenty of value for the casual clicker. When Electric Orange heard about Listicles, though, it was only an idea in the head of L Mag President Scott Stedman. We designed and coded the site that you see today. We worked with the L Magazine to create a logo and overall brand identity for the site. We wrote the html, css, and javascript and set up Wordpress as the site's content management system. Once they site launched, we got to work helping grow Listicles' traffic. Since that time Listicles has become a mainstay in traffic for The L Magazine, and as a subdomain it brings in a substantial portion of the referral traffic to their main site.
Since Listicles was a site with lots of quick posts about anything and everything, we knew there was a real opportunity to generate traffic from a broad range of sources. In initially setting up the site we suggested using the Wordpress platform to enable us to have many options as possible for SEO. The result was a site rich in unique content that generates 15% of its total traffic from search engines alone.
For Listicles, a large part of catching the content on fire is actively sharing posts from person to person. We worked with the Listicles team to make sure each of their posts were tagged properly with SEO-based keywords, and that they were using the best descriptions possible. This enabled Listicles to spread virally. But, we knew the content had even more potential in social media. We organized an effective social media plan that incorporated content sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Buzzfeed, as well as using The L Magazine's profiles on Twitter and Facebook. The result was that Listicles became a viral juggernaut with 75% of its total traffic coming from referrals.