We’ve been very focused on driving our social media channels (Facebook and Twitter) this year, on Lost At E Minor in particular, and this has been crucial to the growth of the site. We now have 18,000+ Facebook Fans and 13,000+ Twitter followers. Meanwhile, the introduction of regular live blogging of significant Australian sporting events on The Roar has been a real spur to weekend traffic growth, which has, in turn, filtered through to the weekday traffic as well.

With more of all this ahead in 2012, it looks promising for an even bigger year.

Results from the past year (current numbers above corresponding figures from same period last year below):

LAEM
Visits
Nov 20, 2011 – Dec 20, 2011 = 575,761
Nov 20, 2010 – Dec 20, 2010 = 353,286

Unique Visitors
Nov 20, 2011 – Dec 20, 2011 = 411,492
Nov 20, 2010 – Dec 20, 2010 = 225,053

We really are focused on making each site the best in the world that day for content. We compliment this through a very active social media presence which tends to amplify the most popular posts of any given day and give them a second life beyond their initial run on the sites.

Big credit, too, must go to our our growing community of fan contributors across both sites, who use Lost At E Minor and The Roar as their blogging platform. They share their thoughts and finds with other like-minded people, all of which creates a unique dialogue between our readers, our writers and and our editors. Conversant by name, conversant by nature.

Without open source software, trillions of work hours would be wasted each month across the globe solving problems which have already been well solved in the past by others. This adds economic benefit to everyone involved in IT, and to businesses generally.

I used to work on building content management systems which cost north of a quarter of a million dollars for each client. WordPress now makes a better project cost in the low thousands. This is good for all parties and results in more efficient work and sees money spent on things which add more value.

I could go on about how powerful open-source software is. But I think the point is clear!

I’ve often wondered, though, why it’s only nerds which seem to have embraced the open-source approach. Why isn’t it done in marketing?

Or law? Talk about an industry which looks to repeatedly solve the same problem over and over. And for $300 an hour at that.

Well, today Startmate, an Australian incubator and supporter of online businesses open-sourced their legal documents.

What an awesome thing to do for entrepreneurs across Australia.

For any small online business, there’s significant cost in setting up these documents. Now most of the heavy lifting has been done for them by providing a clean, well structured set of documents from which to start working on.

I bet they had many folks suggesting otherwise. But they did it.

And by doing so, it means a solved-problem is available to more people for less cost. So dollars can be spent on things which aren’t yet solved.

Well done Startmate. Big respect. From actions, not words.

So it’s nice to continue the recent traffic posts by sharing more news on the traffic front.

The Roar just tipped 400,000 unique browsers and 1 million + pages over the past 31 days. We’re still doing over 20,000 comments and publishing 330 fan articles monthly.

Our TV ad is probably helping a bit on this front, so are a number of other things we’re doing to grow great Australian sports traffic.

And while The Roar has almost quadrupled in traffic this year, Lost At E Minor has also experienced rocket-like growth.

The past rolling 31 days has Lost At E Minor reaching 313,000 unique visitors on just under 1 million pages. (We saw 33,000 unique visitors to the site yesterday and today’s about the same, so if I wrote this post tomorrow then that 313,000 would be more like 370,000.)

Lost also posts about 20 articles a day, about half of them submitted by our audience, who are spread out across the world and who know how to find the right mix of high and low-brow culture we aim for.

Part of what’s fueling this traffic growth is our focus on social amplification (yes, that’s a buzz phrase…apologies). Just have a look at our ‘Best of‘ page to see how many people Tweet or Facebook Like our posts.

And this post has had a lazy 6,000 Likes and 900 Tweets. Not bad.

We have some solid things around the corner, including newly re-designed sites which will be faster and simpler while still letting our content shine through.

And a domain change is on the way for lostateminor.com. It’ll be shorter and will set-us up for success in terms of reaching 1,000,000+ visitors monthly.

Our TV commercial is now running across Ten’s sports shows (see the ad below in all its glory).

It’ll be interesting to see what impact this has on our traffic.

My sense is that we might not necessarily have a huge impact on direct visitors to the site (though of course, we hope it will). That is, I don’t think we’ll see a noticeable spike each time the ad runs.

But I do think we’ll see a benefit in search traffic (an area where we do very well with already).

It’s been established that people are more likely to click on a link in a Google search result where they are familiar with the site’s brand. Our TVC will add familiarity, hopefully making people more likely to choose a result in Google from The Roar as opposed to another.

Secondly, there’s a lot to be gained from general awareness.

When I’m at sporting events, I often look out into the audience and wonder how many people are familiar with The Roar. My guess would be despite our traffic continuing to surge (we’re now reaching over 300,000 uniques and serving 1,000,000 pages a month), only a small percentage of people at a typical footy match would know of The Roar.

So this TVC will hopefully change this.

And as more people know of the site, this can only bring good things.

The Roar’s TV commercial

What’s your background in media?

I have been in the advertising, publishing and media industry both here and overseas for over 25 years – straight from school. I started as a media planner/buyer in full service agencies – and then jumped the fence to advertising sales.

I have enjoyed various roles at BRW/Fairfax and News. In 2000 I was on maternity leave from Fairfax and looking for something to do for a few hours each day. I moonlighted doing some ad sales for a small start-up site – Essential Baby – and stayed until the sale to Fairfax Digital 7 years later – it felt very full-circle indeed.

Since leaving Essential Baby/Fairfax over 3 years ago I have been consulting businesses in the development of their advertising sales & revenue strategy. Everything from media kits to rate structure/forecasting to defining their market position.

Many media owners recognise that advertising is not their core expertise though it can be a key revenue source. They use my services to develop some or all of this publisher-to-advertiser segment of their business.

I also do some contract advertising sales training, various special projects and produce articles such as Digital People on media trade site Digital Ministry.

In the last 18 months I have launched an advertising directory – MediaScope. We are now the most comprehensive resource of niche, alternative and emerging advertising options in the Australian market with over 2,500 listings – and we’re growing fast. We are also realising several tailored extensions to our core directory service.

What’s the elevator pitch behind MediaScope?

MediaScope was launched to solve a deepening problem in the media trading landscape. We’re an advertising directory which connects buyers and sellers focusing on the often hard to find, constantly evolving and highly effective ‘long tail’ or ‘beyond mainstream’ end of the market. Very simply our aim is to ‘aggregate increasing advertising choice’.

What’s the number one problem facing the buy side in media in Australia?

I think there are several problems facing the buy side. From my perspective it is the problem of missing opportunities to reach their – or their clients – market. The media landscape is fragmenting and changing so quickly – advertisers, marketers and sme’s are too time and resource poor to ensure they are seeing – and assessing – all the options which are increasingly available to reach their audiences.

There is no doubt ad buyers have almost too much choice for their advertising spend and if anything this over-supply has led some buyers – particularly large media agencies- to reduce the number of media suppliers they trade with and increase their focus to the ‘usual suspects’ or low hanging fruit options. If I was a client I would be concerned about this.

What’s the number one problem facing the sell side in media in Australia?

Again – many problems. From my MediaScope perspective it is in two parts – firstly building their story for advertising buyers and secondly finding an effective story teller.

I see many media owners with a great deal of potential to either generate or increase some level of revenue through advertising. Their challenge is to develop strategies and tactics to communicate (more) effectively to potential advertising buyers.

The second part to this is having a highly effective story teller – it’s all very well to have a great story but you need someone to tell it.

Not only is it a very tight market to find good advertising sales people, sometimes even getting through the door to see advertising buyers can be the biggest problem facing the sell side – particularly if you are media in the niche, alternative and emerging end of the market ie not the ‘usual suspects’ or low hanging fruit.

How do you help each side out?

Good question! I can help both buyers and sellers in many ways both through the MediaScope advertising directory and also through a growing range of tailored one-on-one services.

Firstly MediaScope provides a comprehensive, free and easy to use central resource to connect advertising buyers and sellers – with a specific focus on beyond mainstream niche, alternative and emerging media options.

We also offer a growing range of one-on-one services such as advertising sales & revenue consultancy – and a media planning service where we help buyers, marketers and agencies identify and qualify new media options based on their specific briefs.

Just the other day an agency rang wanting to reach teachers – I was able to very quickly point them directly to candidate media options which was not on their radar.

Why does this matter?

For online businesses, everything turns on distribution (traffic). Traffic means we have good content. It’s also our currency, as advertising is our primary revenue source.

In a way, traffic is the new barrier entry. The printing press, if you like, is no longer a barrier to entry. Anyone can set-up a website overnight. So traffic, and reach, is the barrier to entry.

We don’t pay for our traffic; it’s almost all organic. (I use almost as we do do very small things to increase our awareness, but it’s trivial compared with our overall traffic flows).

So, the race has begun between The Roar and Lost At E Minor for which is the first site to reach 1,000,000 page impressions monthly.

Watch this space.

When he finally turned up in the last week, we had to do something more than just enjoy his company and his funky mix of music.

Paddle board surfing was the original thought, but the surf stayed away for the better part of a week. With the ocean out of the picture, we instead decided to hit the go-karts at the local track, with mixed form.

Zolton demonstrated that he has spent too much time in the US, attempting to negotiate all turns NASCAR-style by turning left at every corner. At least, that’s why we think he was so slow…

Zac hit the ground running and put in a few hot laps, but didn’t have the crucial ingredient to go hell-for-leather: a lack of sanity caused by breathing in petrol fumes.

Mark Webber fanatic Tristan clearly has inhaled his quota while watching F1 GPs. Consequently he was speedy, but may have overdosed and was black-flagged after attempting to drink Red Bull on track while muttering something about “gives you wings, gives you wings”.

A great afternoon out on track.

We believe strongly in compelling design. Design adds luster, a premium feel, and differentiates.

It amazes me how often businesses and sites launch with scant consideration to design. They’re not setting themselves up for success. And apart from anything else, strong design allows you to charge more. Just ask Apple.

We also believe in executing strongly on our websites. This means compelling, smart and well thought out functionality.

When I first started building our sites (back in 2005) I believed in having lots of ‘hooks’ on a site. That means lot of links, lots of related content.

Basically…just lots of stuff.

The thinking was that if you put a 100 hooks down, you’ll catch a fish. The fish, in this context, is one more page view.

But over the years I’ve noticed two things which mean I’m now removing things from our sites rather than adding to them.

The first thing is that despite all the new additions we’ve made to our sites (think Related posts, Best of sections, Most popular lists, and so on), our average pages viewed per session has never really changed.

Nothing I’ve added to our sites has increased this metric significantly. Sometimes it’s actually reduced pages viewed per session.

The second thing (which I’m sure is related) is that as we add each new feature, it slows the site down just that little bit.

And this brings me to my main point: a great website needs to be fast.

I now have a need for speed and I’ll sacrifice functionality over speed every day.

My thinking is that if your site is super…super fast, then people will be inclined to just browse and find for that related content. They don’t need the link there.

They also know that the transaction cost for making one more page request is almost zero. But on a sluggish site, they’ll be less inclined to click as the page render latency is kinda painful.

It’ll be a massive challenge getting our sites fast (they aren’t yet, I know this!); as they rely heavily on images. And we also serve ads, which tends to bloat out the site with rubbish javascript and so on.

But we’ll get there.

We’re using content and application delivery networks. And each day we’re looking to remove functionality so that the sites get faster and faster. We’re tweaking and rebuilding templates. It’s a long journey to undo errors made in the past. But we think speed gives more to our users than additional functionality. (So does Google by the way – watch for them rewarding fast sites over slow ones. It’s already a signal they use, I believe.)

Time, as they say, will tell.