Social Search Substance Satire

I work for a lifestyle publisher. It’s a tricky time for our business as a whole – there’s no denying that. We have a small digital team that needs to answer all the questions of a few hundred people. That’s not easy when you work in lifestyle publishing, because this is something that aims to cover a wide range of subjects. It’s generic and there’s a problem.

Aim to be the Best at One Thing

The problem struck me as I read through Seth Godin’s Purple Cow¸ and really got reinforced when I read Gary Vaynerchuck’s Crush It!: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passionn. Both of these books make points that you must be able to aim at being the best in the world at something, no matter how niche, if you want success. The more focused you can become, the more achievable this will be. Being broad in your approach is out, because there are loads of people more focused in niches that will outdo you on each topic. People can create their own lifestyle ‘publication’ by bookmarking their favourite blogs that cover fashion, relationships, celebrity etc –and then just navigate straight to them at the click of a button.

This means, of course, that lifestyle websites face a big problem – savvier web users will abandon them unless they are the best for every topic they cover, and with more digital natives coming of age, you’ve got to think more and more lifestyle publishers will lose their audience.

Search demand for major lifestyle publishers in the women’s market has declined since the start of Web 2.0 in 2006.

A More Focused Approach

Unless you have BBC like resource, then there’s only one solution – strip back what you’re doing. Cover less and be more focused. Monthly magazines aim to filter the best of what they believe their audience will appreciate for a whole month. They don’t need to cover that much news. On the web, this isn’t feasible; you almost certainly need topicality to remain relevant in search, and the amount of content relevant required for your audience will be overwhelming if you have too many things to cover. Some of our lifestyle sites have a dozen or more top nav options. Inevitably some of these remain unfilled for some time. My recommendation is to cut the options down to three or four.

A lot of navigation options!

Typical Toilet Talking:

I’m also slightly perturbed by the need of subcategories within main navigation. They might help users find relevant stuff quicker, but if they’re not regularly updated, then you’re misleading users into thinking these sections are important. Use side navigation or tagging unless these are going to be filled daily.

Beware ‘Entertainment’

One more: Never, ever have a category as generic as entertainment.  That category is so woolly that it demands sub categorisation into incredibly broad subjects such as film, music and TV, which are hard enough to cover as it is!

What’s the Solution?

The problem lies in the attempt of digital to replicate offline. It is unnecessary to try and focus on so many topics – all magazines will have one central theme that can be replicated online. If that is not attractive to advertisers, use it anyway to placate users but make sure you also offer something that is advertiser friendly. Thus users of the website will still remain happy and can find out more about the central them they buy the magazine for.

Being more focused is better for the user, and you’re more likely to get deeper, more focused content on your topic. With this in mind, you’re more likely to get more links and do better in your SEO and social, thus get more traffic.