High traffic WordPress architecture using AWS Lightsail

Here is how I built a high-performance WordPress website in AWS Lightsail for aier.org.  While low-traffic blogs can be hosted on a shared hosting service or a cheap VPC, if your site hosts millions of visitors each month, you will need a more ambitious service-oriented architecture.

The key to high-performance WordPress is a service-oriented architecture that splits the application into independent layers.  Amazon provides a reference architecture for high-performance WordPress hosting on AWS.  While this is a great start, all those services get expensive and complex to manage.  I wanted a lot fewer moving parts and to make things maintenance-free.  I also included important performance and management optimizations such as a dedicated editor server and git-based deployment.  To lower costs, I used AWS Lightsail and Cloudflare to get significant cost savings versus AWS’s EC2 and CloudFront-based reference architecture.

High-performance WordPress requirements for my project:

  • Lower the cost of hosting from well over $20K/year to under $1500/year while supporting many millions of monthly users.
  • Keep backend 100% available and fast regardless of traffic.
  • Highly available and highly scalable architecture: easy recovery from failure, and ability to quickly scale without any downtime.
  • Minimal administrative management overhead (the servers should maintain themselves after I set them up).
  • Minimal configuration – the server should be set up with just a few commands: I promised to build this out in two hours.
  • Git-based deployment process. Deploy website updates via git merge.

Process

Below, I explain why I used specific tools and configuration, then I’ll provide one technical details to help you do the same.

  1. Configure a basic WordPress hosting environment
  2. Migrate or build your WordPress site
  3. Upgrade the hosting environment for scalability
  4. Configure analytics and alerting tools

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Search Engine Optimization: Proven Strategies for Nonprofits in 2019

According to a recent survey by Zogby Interactive, the Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers, and radio. The majority of Americans now prefer the Internet as their primary and most reliable source of news. Specifically, online publications are preferred over social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

If your mission is to influence opinions, the web cannot be ignored. You must achieve an effective online presence to be a part of conversations that matter. To discover content online, two sources dominate today; social media and search engines, specifically, Facebook and Google.

Publishers need to understand search engine trends to stay relevant

Google and Facebook dominate referral traffic to nearly all news sites today. As dynamic tech companies, Google and Facebook and constantly tweaking their algorithms, so online publishers need to stay informed.

Because the exact algorithms used by search engines and social media sites are secret and ever-changing, a mythology has arisen around the field of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. There are numerous online debates between “white hat” and “black hat” SEO “experts” who recommend and criticize technical tricks to improve search rankings. Because search engines and social feeds have the power to entirely kill most online businesses and publishers, an adversarial attitude dominates the thinking about SEO strategies.

Content is still king in online publishing

The reality is that content is still king. Creating interesting and relevant content that people want to watch or read is still by far the most important factor in the success of a website. The goal of search engines and social networks is not to destroy independent publishers or ruin businesses, but to provide value to their users by showing them the most relevant, reputable, and quality content. Content is key, but it needs to be organized and presented in a way that is easy for search engines to find it, understand what it’s about, and assess its quality.

Google and Facebook want to be your partner, not your adversary

It’s critical to understand that Google and Facebook want to tell you exactly how to be successful on their platform. Their need for secrecy on the details of their algorithm comes mainly from the need to deter malicious actors that attempt to get more traffic than the quality of their content merits. Google and Bing will tell you exactly how they see your website and suggest how to improve your search visibility. They want to work with publishers to promote higher-quality content and rewarding experiences for users.

As a publisher, Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools is your most valuable asset for improving search performance. Furthermore, on-site content changes (“onsite SEO”) usually can have far more impact on search performance than external tweaks to search engines and link-building (“offsite SEO”).

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How to make the most of the 2018 Google Ad Grants rule changes

ad-ban

Does that big red message look familiar? If your non-profit received a Google Ads Grant (if not, apply here), you may have noticed a major change in Google Ad Grants policy in 2018. Here is a summary of the new rules from Google, and here is a more comprehensive writeup. (Note: Neither list is perfectly accurate as these rules are not 100% enforced.) The bottom line with the 2018 rule changes is that you must have relevant, narrowly-targeted, high-performing ads with conversion tracking and relevant landing pages or your Google Grant account will be suspended. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Google removed the $2 bid limit, so you can bid more per click and compete for keywords that were previously off-limits. Below are some points for what I’ve learned for surviving and thriving with the new Google Ad Grant policy: The main success criteria for an Ad Grants account are:

  • High click-through rate – low (< 5%) CTR is the main reason accounts get suspended. If your account does not maintain a 5% rate for two months, you will get suspended. Loophole: AdWords Express accounts are exempt from this rule.
  • Low landing page bounce rate – visitors immediately navigating away from the ad page is another reason accounts get suspended.
  • A high percentage (75% is my goal) used of the monthly Grant budget.
  • Conversion tracking: clicks are a start, but you should also be tracking on-site conversions (i.e. leads and purchases). This is not just valuable to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, but is now required by Google.

In the process of managing FEE’s $40,000/month account, we were suspended three times, and learned a lot about the new rules in the process. It is possible to maximize your spend, but the game is a lot harder, and you will have to put a lot more thought into the process. There are three strategies for being successful with a Grants account:

  1. Well defined audiences: this includes both narrowly targeted search keywords, demographic filters, and retarding (if possible)
  2. Relevant landing pages: landing pages should be specific to the search phrase and have enough information and call to action so that user can complete their search
  3. Enough campaigns targeting high-volume keywords with > 5% CTR to maximize the Grants budget. For example: with an average cost of $2/click, hitting 100% of a $10,000 budget requires 5,000 clicks*5%CTR = 100,000 searches, or 50 ad sets with 2,000 searches each. These are hypothetical numbers, but 50 campaigns targeting 100K searches seems like a reasonable target to hit a $10K budget. Here is FEE for comparison: about 40 campaigns, 272,000 searches, 22,563 clicks, $28,000/month current spend. That is: 8.3% CTR, $1.23 per click, 1092 leads generated, or $25 per lead.

The three key build-out steps you should take to implement to an effective Grants campaign are:

  1. Build customer personas: work with your team to build profiles of the demographics and interests, and potential search phrases
  2. Research search phrases: use the Google Keyword Planner, Moz Pro and other tools to find the intersection of
  3. high-volume search phrases
  4. suitable landing pages on your site
  5. low keyword difficulty
  6. Build out Ad campaigns: using the keywords and landing pages previous identified, build out

The following practices will be needed on an ongoing monthly basis: Review campaign performance, stop low-performing campaigns (important to prevent Grants account suspensions) and replace them with new ones. Campaigns may also experience fatigue for some phrases and require rotation.

  1. Research and recommend new landing pages to take advantage of target keywords
  2. Implement business goal tracking to optimize for lead generation and bounce rate/session duration in addition to click-through rates
  3. Review and implement with Google Ads feedback (Google provides ongoing feedback and optimization suggestions) and resolve account suspensions.

Finally: landing page considerations:You must have relevant landing pages with clear mission-specific, non-commercial content. One way I did this is by creating “essential guides” for the topics in various campaigns. Another strategy which works great for both organic and paid traffic is to compile pillar pages. Do not expect to be successful by sending all your paid clicks to your homepage. Google states that “your homepage and frequently visited web pages may not be used for Destination goal types” Requesting reactivation: Is your account suspended? Once you’ve complied with all rules above, request reactivation here.

How FEE is responding to Facebook’s algorithm changes

In January 2018, Facebook announced major changes to the algorithm which decides what stories appears in users News Feeds. These changes have substantially affected the visibility of content from online publishers on Facebook. While Facebook has always updated the algorithms behind the News Feed on a regular basis, the recent changes have dramatically affected the visibility of publishers with a substantial amount of visits from Facebook (such as FEE.org) and driven some of them bankrupt.

While part of the impetus for the changes is the “fake news” scandal, much of it has to do with the rise of “clickbait” publishers which profit from low-quality, sensational or salacious stories which get high visibility and are highly addictive but do not result in an enjoyable or informative experience overall. The battle between content discovery platforms (i.e. Facebook) and publishers who try to game the rules is currently playing out on Facebook just as it did on Google in the early 2010s.

Facebook’s 2017 – 2018 changes can be summarized as:

  1. The visibility of activity from friends and a user’s community is prioritized relative to online publishers. Also, content which sparks conversation and reactions from friends is prioritized.
  2. “High quality” stories are prioritized over “clickbait.” Quality stories include longer videos, comments, web pages with substantive content and other criteria.

(Source: Bufferapp.com)

Buffer has a detailed timeline and overview of these changes and a detailed analysis of the algorithm changes.

Many publishers who formerly received a large percentage of traffic from Facebook have seen significant drops in traffic. FEE was especially affected as we received nearly 43% of our traffic from Facebook in early 2017 and subsequently saw that drop to 23%.

Are these changes bad for publishers?

While sites like FEE.org have been somewhat unfairly punished as a publisher of “quality” content rather than “clickbait,” it is overly simplistic to see Facebook as the “bad guy” taking away traffic from publishers. Facebook has made a business decision to prioritize content from friends and family. They want to be a social network, not a news discovery platform. It is up to the market to decide whether Facebook becomes more or less valuable as a platform as a result.

Furthermore, in general, publishers of “quality” content will tend to compete in a meritocratic fashion with publishers for users’ organic reach. There are a lot of disclaimers here, but people generally accept that Google’s algorithm is mostly fair (and I believe it is) despite many claims of bias and ruined business models when Google had to adjust to “black-hat” SEO tactics. I believe that Facebook News Feed algorithms will probably come to be seen the same away some years from now.

The impact of social media on FEE.org

FEE.org saw substantial and highly volatile growth in social traffic starting in early 2016. This growth continued until late 2017 when it fell to 2015 levels. Facebook’s algorithm seems to have been responsible for nearly doubling social traffic, before falling back to the 2015 baseline. In other words, Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away. FEE.org’s success with Facebook was largely due to its popularity with younger audiences that tended to push stories to go viral by repeated sharing. However, the “quality” of this engagement was low: for example, FEE.org’s bounce rate for Facebook referrals was 90%. As of October 2017, the bounce rate has been under 4%. It’s likely that many people who shared or liked our stories did not actually read them.

3-year sessions vs bounce rate for Facebook.com referrals:

(Note: The changes are not as stark as this graph shows due to measurement changes but the overall trend is valid.)

If we look at sessions which came from Facebook.com, we saw fee.org sessions grow from 159K in December 2015 to a peak of 386K in February 2016, before falling back under 100K in September 2017. We speculate that this drop is in part because Facebook lowered the value of sharing posts relative to the value of genuine reactions (likes/comments). (Note: Facebook implements strong and ever-adapting anti-cheat measures to ensure the integrity of “genuine” reactions.)

Traffic Notes:

  1. FEE.org saw a long-term lift of about 300K sessions per month from all sources from 2015 – 2018 — such as external referrals, organic search, and email.
  2. FEE.org traffic follows a strong seasonal pattern (much of our traffic is from students performing research during the school year).

Illustration: 3-year performance — social versus all traffic:

How FEE is Responding to Facebook Rule Changes

The loss of FEE’s #1 traffic source requires adapting our strategy to maintain our business goals. Our primary means of doing so is to replace lost organic reach with paid reach (ads). The team at FEE has learned to do this with some effectiveness, despite ongoing algorithm changes:

Organic vs Paid Reach: January 2017 – April, 2018:

We believe that paid reach should have different business goals than organic reach. In other words, we do not believe in merely paying to replace organic readership with paid readership. This is both expensive and does not generate returning traffic. Instead, FEE’s marketing team had focused our paid reach on specific business goals that serve our organizational priorities, such as email leads, event registrations, market research, and new audience outreach.

Finally, while Facebook has moved away from a focus on publishers, there are other platforms which are focused on story discovery. FEE has experimented with Apple News, Quora, Flipboard, Medium, Reddit and other platforms which may surpass Facebook as content discovery mechanisms.

Reacting to Facebook Ad Strategy Changes

We’ve also had to adapt to ongoing changes in Facebook’s ad platform in response to events such as ads by alt-right extremists, the Cambridge Analytica leak, and intense competition from other businesses who were “exiled” from organic reach by algorithm changes in 2018.

We’ve noticed a significant change in the effectiveness of our paid lead generation ads. We ran the same ad for our Essential Guide to Health Care Reform in November and April and had wildly different results. In November 2017, we paid on average $0.72 per email address. In April 2018, the cost per email rose to $5.07.

Our current strategies include:

  • Experimenting with landing page view ads instead of lead gen ads.
  • Relying more on popups than Facebook ads to collect email addresses.
  • Boosting content that gets great organic reach (>80% usual reach) to try to “ride the wave” of the organic traffic.

Focusing on Quality of Interactions vs Quantity

As explained above, in the last two years, both Facebook and Google have made efforts to limit content reach to the subset of users with “genuine” engagement or interest. The downside for us is that fewer people see our content. The upside is that the people who do see our content, are more likely to pay attention to it. Furthermore, we have a chance to be rewarded for more meaningful and useful content.

To measure meaningful engagement, we will try to prioritize meaningful engagement: active time on page (provided by Parse.ly analytics), longer video views, email captures on FEE.org, Facebook Ads, and landing pages, and Facebook/YouTube subscriptions. We will also try to improve the quality of our content by sharing fewer stories from other sites on FEE.org and writing more in-depth analysis and practical career/life guidance.

Reposted from FEE.org

FEE Content Team: Strategies and Results

(Guest post by By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Director of Content for FEE)

Introduction: a bold experiment in reaching mainstream culture

Two years ago, FEE embarked on an experiment born of frustration. FEE’s website was not a product of its own but rather a kind of information board for advertising the institution. It had low performance. Brand recognition of the institution was not increasing.

And yet there was clearly opportunity. When you look at the venues considered to be mainstream distributors of ideas, they all trend toward the progressive and social democratic, i.e., statist. They fill up the smartphone feeds of millennials. They speak to them on all their social media platforms. Their websites enjoy millions of hits a week. They are profoundly affecting culture – not through political activism, policy study, or academic work, but rather through public commentary on the passing scene. They define what is fashionable.

What is preventing the ideas of liberty from entering this space? Truly nothing but talent, cleverness, and dedication. FEE aspired to apply these traits to our work. We pursued dramatic technological, distribution, and content changes designed to enter into the realm of public culture in a way that directly competes with mainstream venues. We deployed a series of objective measurements to assess our progress. We also set out to be adaptive in all these areas so we could continue to achieve this goal as the tools grew and adapted themselves.

The remainder of this post addresses the content aspect of the strategy.

Fixes and Changes


We first set out to perform a number of technical fixes: in-sourcing the website code for full control and fast development, tagging thousands of articles according to topic, cleaning up legacy cruft, adding missing metadata to articles, and so on. It was a huge job.

We set out to stop the traffic leakage we were experiencing (people hitting the site and leaving) with a series of strategies to capture email addresses. We then built up our daily sending list, from 3,000 two years ago to 45,000 today. As time went on, we added browser notifications for new articles, a new web design to enhance site credibility, and infinite scroll on content display.

We then turned to new content itself. As we looked back at FEE material over the decades, we found a contrast with the way it appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, the material was directed toward a general audience. It did not use in-group language. It didn’t presume that people were already on board with the libertarian vision. But as time marched forward, there was a subtle change. The language became ever more insular and in-group focused, aimed at movement edification rather than culture-wide influence. The editors presumed, probably rightly, that they were speaking to a marginal group about a narrow topic.

Outreach

It was renewed interesting in growth among new audiences that motivated a move toward achieving a broader reach. Today, the purpose of FEE’s content is to describe and explain current events, history, policy, and social and economic theory in light of the ideas of liberty, as articulated by the liberal tradition and exemplified by FEE’s 70-year history.

The purpose is to expand the network of users and broaden the base of people who are exposed to a liberty perspective. The metric for us is summed up in one word: traffic, which is a fair proxy for audience. Without this essential component, not much else matters. You can have the perfect product, the perfect prose, the best analysis, the most wonderful presentation, the most correct doctrine. But if no one sees it, there is a problem. The element of traffic also intensifies the commitment to quality work. As Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” You have some accountability. You can begin to craft your product in line with consumer preferences, and thereby replicate the essential dynamic and driving force of the market itself. After that, we look at demographics, granulated data about types of content, what they do, and how sticky their traffic is.

For traffic metrics, we depend on Google Analytics for granulated data and Alexa for ordinal ranking of our site relative to others. In two years, we’ve moved from the 130,000th most popular site on the web up to a stable 22,000. Our institutional goal is always up, with the hope that we will eventually stabilize in the range of 1,000. We have no estimate for when or even if this will happen.

Growth depends on content sharing – not just a first-round of readership but a second, third, and fourth. The content has to spread, not hit the wall of in-group consumption. Why do people share? There are many reasons. Sometimes a hard-edged ideological piece can work for what we call in-reach. But too much ideological vernacular can also discourage sharing, simply because what appears on people’s social timelines becomes a reflection of how they want to present themselves to a wide range of people within their friend networks.

Because social media is a main source of news today, FEE set out to present content that didn’t so much preach the doctrine but illustrate it in a mainstream and credible voice, and provide excitement about how liberal ideas can provide a better and more fulfilling understanding of the world around us. This content should not only feed our fans, but reach outside our existing audience.

Inreach vs. Outreach

For moment-by-moment analytics (and the team truly does follow traffic patterns all day and through the evening), we use Parse.ly, a platform specifically developed for editorial use. It logs on an ongoing basis what percentage of users are new or returning, a metric we use to determine whether a piece has in-reach power or out-reach power.
 Screen Shot 2017-01-12 at 5.01.43 PM.png
These two examples come from the day I’m writing this post. A piece on Google’s new translation algorithm posts these results from today.

This is successful outreach. For each new user, we try our best to harvest email, obtain approval for browser notifications, and keep people on the site by pushing more material along the same lines, dropping cookies that are capable of machine learning according to a user’s browsing habits.
 Screen Shot 2017-01-12 at 5.05.41 PM.png
On the other hand, here is a much more complex piece on libertarian strategy and the role of ideas – a piece we had intentionally decided for in-reach in order to deepen reader’s relationship with the liberal idea. And sure enough, the reader results are very different.

To be sure, every piece we publish starts out with nearly 100% returning visitors. It is not possible to bypass this group but for paid and targeted advertising. Given that people mostly reach our content via social media, it would be expected that the people who see it first are the fan base on FEE (and this fan base has grown by a factor of 10 in two years). We depend on them to share further outside our network and into theirs. But the path the content takes following that initial release depends heavily on the topic and approach we take with the content itself.

FEE, then, faces a dual obligation: reach new people and feed an existing fan base to further inspire them toward a deeper commitment. Each is important. But given the desire to grow our audience, FEE takes seriously the obligation to seek and explain to all willing listeners of goodwill. We adhere to principle but don’t necessarily wear our ideology on our sleeve or throw labels around, any more than The Atlantic explicitly advocates social democratic ideology in its articles. We show more than tell, in a way that reflects confidence. To put it another way, our philosophy is our musical scale but our literary output is our song.

Editorial Roadmap

We’ve discerned that the path to success must be discovered day-to-day through trial-and-error by a creative and venturesome team. It’s a matter of balance: energy with dignity, boldness with class, accessibility with substance, always striving for impact, excellence, improvement, and growth, while modeling the spirit of freedom.

Below are rules of the road we’ve established that reflect the mission and spirit of FEE.

  1. Illustrate the social, moral, and practical merit of liberty as a principle of human association, and present this radical idea in a mainstream voice;
  2. Achieve a balance of news, think pieces, long form and short form, inreach and outreach, classics, reprints from partner organizations, history, law, economics, cultural criticism, personal advice, biography, and so on;
  3. Transcend the left-right paradigm, with roots in “mainline” intellectual traditions;
  4. Strive to be engaging and interesting, with a harmony of graphics, title, and content with a premium on good writing and not just on taking the right position;
  5. Contain no profanity and avoid tacky and vulgar expressions and images;
  6. Eschew overly technical jargon or esoteric topics;
  7. Avoid overly inflammatory rhetoric that panders to ideological biases or otherwise deploys capricious anger, ridicule, name-calling, and invective;
  8. Avoid in-group, insular language and buzz phrases that can only be understood by our most learned fans while making new readers feel unwelcome;
  9. Avoid appearing to push vendettas against individuals or groups or to attack the person, as opposed to the person’s ideas;
  10. Avoid anything that smacks of partisan politicking.

Social Media

Social media provides the most referrals to FEE.org. Among the platforms, Facebook is the referral engine for 60% of traffic. The next highest known source is Twitter with 5%, then follows Reddit, StumbleUpon, HackerNews, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Blogger. Instagram refers no traffic. It might provide some brand recognition value, but the ROI is unknown. The low level of traffic from Twitter is a bit misleading because these are high-level influencers who then post to their own pages and to Facebook itself. So Twitter works more as a spark than a flame. Screen Shot 2017-01-13 at 10.39.44 AM.png

For Facebook, we use the Instant Articles application, which speeds up viewing on digital devices. We do almost no paid boosting of articles because we’ve found that if an article is going to do well, it does so without boosting, and if it is going to fail, it will fail regardless of boosting. We do pay for targeted impressions of particular content on individuals’ news feeds, based on carefully selected demographics. Using emails drawn from Salesforce data, we are in the position to place content on donor pages and others based on web-viewing habits.

Intriguingly, 30% of our social referrals qualify as dark social, that is via private messages, private groups, private forums, SMS, and so on. This is a powerful source of traffic but it is neither traceable nor influenceable. As for Reddit, we’ve discovered what others have found: there is no viable way to focus on feeding this source, for the platform is extremely averse to perceived gaming. All we can really do is provide a Reddit link at the top of articles and invite readers to use it.

We automate as much of our social as we can. Every new article (we publish eight per weekday and three to five on both Saturday and Sunday) is automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter using the service Zapier. This massively reduces the chance of error. We post every 45 minutes during the day and every two hours following close of business. Other postings are done by hand by a specialist who follows trending topics and posts relevant legacy content. We have not typically reposted material from other places on the web, but have opted for the publishing strategy described below. In addition, we use Facebook to post institutional news and media.

We use two additional publication venues: Medium.com and Flipboard.com. Using both hand and automated tools, we attempt to keep a solid lineup of articles published at those distribution channels. While Flipboard provides direct traffic to FEE.org, Medium does not – that is, articles “live” on Medium. However, it does account for some referrals, and it also increases brand awareness and realizes certain mission goals with very low cost.

Email as a Product

As implausible as it might sound, email remains one of the most valuable digital products, and, hence a solid infrastructure of email contacts is essential. Because we are producing daily content, we put a high premium on the number of people who received daily emails. Two years ago, we sent to 300 but today send to 45,000, in part by defaulting our email signups to become a daily subscription. We’ve used third-party popups via AddThis but our signups increased 5-10 times by creating our own internal version. Of course popups tend to annoy people and, for this reason, nonprofits might try to avoid them. This is a mistake, in our view, for one reason: they work. We need this infrastructure for our operations.

Of course this also places an extra burden on FEE to turn its daily email into a valuable commodity, something not just for promotion but that also provides delight on its own. Subject lines are chosen carefully to be engaging, and they are different each day. Each send – and we send every day at the noon hour – includes a charming and witty moving gif that is related to the article. The idea here is to create a sense of drama for each day: what gif will I get to see today? As a result, though our numbers of gone up dramatically, our open rates remain very steady. It is a product that people consume on a daily basis, thus increasing brand awareness and gratitude that translates to donor support.

Republishing and Author Payments


FEE has attempted to foster a culture of content sharing within the movement generally. We first put all our content in the Creative Commons, choosing the license Attribution 4.0, which allows for any kind of republishing on any basis provided the source is credited. We negotiated a number of agreements with partner organizations to re-publish their material. We estimate the ratio of “original” to “republished” to be around 40-60%. In terms of traffic, we can discern no trends to predict the reach of either type. Much depends on title, image, trending topic, and compelling content.

Our RSS feeds are set to retrieve the full article content so it can be republished on any site in full. In addition, there is a separate feed automatically created for every author on the site (more than 2,000).

We ended author payments – a break with a 70-year practice, so far as we can tell – because we saw no relationship between the quality of submission and financial compensation. As a result of ending all author payments, we lost perhaps 3 of our stable of 75 or so contributors of original content. In contrast, we have added cash prizes to incentivize authors as a way of broadcasting that we do value writing talent. What authors do value is speed of response, carefulness of editing, and a quick turnaround time.

Most outside contributors receive a personalized response within an hour of submission during the work day, and accepted articles appear on the site within 24 hours. This speed and responsiveness is the best way that FEE can show its appreciation to those who choose our venue as their preferred outlet. And here is another case for keeping traffic as high as we can: FEE can get the word out.

The Team and the Division of Labor

The content team is made up of five people currently: editor, managing editor, associate editor, and two content interns. The skill set required: high-level literacy, proofing skills, basic html, speed, low-level image manipulation, facility with the content management system (Umbraco, which is an open-source management system designed for Dot Net), creativity with titles, and a willingness to work all hours including nights, weekends, and holidays since digital media has no hours of operation. We try to maintain a content mix of original and republished material on a full range of topics. We consult with each other throughout the day and otherwise, in person and on Slack, which is FEE’s internal communication system.

Our work flow attempts to stay one day ahead of the publication schedule. All progress is logged on Trello, a collaboration board that allows for attachments and conversations as material moves through the production structure.

Screen Shot 2017-01-13 at 12.56.36 PM.png

We use Feedly for aggregating content for possible republication. This permits us to navigate content quickly, so that we are not wasting time with random web browsing. Everything we publish is flexible within minutes of going live. Once the publication lineup is ready for the next day, all staff are encouraged to work on writing original content.

The Future

FEE is committed to retaining its existing user base and growing it in every way possible, as quickly as possible. We want to contribute to making the ideas of freedom familiar and credible for the rising generation, thus fulfilling FEE’s historic mission and serving as a beacon of excellence in digital publishing. We are confident that we can achieve this with a continued outward focus on customer needs, adherence to the metrics as a main indicator of success and/or failure, and an unrelenting willingness to adapt to changing conditions in the world’s fast-moving market for information.

Technology Summary

  • Slack: internal office communications; replaces email
  • Feedly: news aggregator for editorial use
  • Parse.ly: real-time metrics reporting and content analysis
  • Umbraco: open-source CMS for ASP.net
  • Zapier: automation of social media
  • Trello: management tool for editorial tasks
  • Flipboard.com: magazine portal for mobile devices
  • Medium.com: popular publishing platform
  • Creative Commons licensing: alternative to restrictive copyright
  • Facebook Instant Articles: dramatic speed increases over old FB browser
  • Zendesk: collaboration tool for external communication
  • Grammerly: handy grammar checker
  • Hubspot: information portal for customer relationships
  • Mailchimp: email sending

How FEE.org gets 30,000 free monthly clicks with Dynamic Search Ads

FEE.org gets about 30,000 clicks from our primary Google AdWords account per month. This is not a lot of traffic – about one day of organic visitors – but the vast majority of Google traffic comes from new users, so it is an important source of new users.

The best part is that this traffic is totally free: FEE get’s a $40,000 per month AdWords credit from Google’s Grants program. That’s $480,000 of free advertising per year!

There are some catches you should be aware of:

  1. A maximum cost-per-click limit of $2.00
  2. Only text ad campaigns are supported
  3. Your ads show below those of paying advertisers
  4. A daily spend limit of 1/30th of your monthly total

In practice, these conditions make it difficult to hit your daily spend limit. Even if you do hit your limit (for example, by targeting hundreds of low-traffic keywords), it can be difficult to send your visitors to fresh content because someone has to keep creating new ads for new articles on your site.

Google AdWords offers an ingenious solution to this challenge: Dynamic Search Ads. This campaign type uses Google Search’s index of your site to automatically create ads matching the keywords that people are searching for. It’s as if someone creates a new ad every time new content is posted on your site! Using Dynamic Search, FEE.org is able to spend about 50% of our $40K budget on ads that send people to the latest FEE.org articles.

How FEE uses Facebook audience sharing to maximize engagement

As social media has become the primary way for young people to discover brands and ideas, the effectiveness of traditional television/print/radio has fallen. Reaching people interested in your ideas on social media is hard — there are so many competing brands vying for their attention. Remarketing (aka retargeting) to audiences known to have an interest or relationship with you is one of the most effective ways to reach people who are most likely to engage with your brand.
While FEE’s marketing has historically been focused on personal referrals and “organic” growth, in 2016, we decided to focus on reaching new audiences and developing new marketing channels. Key to our plan is reaching new audiences on social media, using some tricks used by top ad agencies that are new to the nonprofit world. Typically, when organizations run ad campaigns – whether web, print, or radio – they target broad demographics. What FEE has been doing with great success is targeting individual people.

We use email lists and website retargeting data (including visitors to FEE.org and partner sites) to target people on social media who have already expressed some interest in liberty ideas. In other words, we match our visitors’ browsing behavior to their Facebook profiles, and show content targeted specifically to them. This gives us very high click-through rates compared to targeting broad demographics, resulting in costs as low as 2 cents per click.
If you are interested in reaching young people who care about free markets and liberty, would you consider trading Facebook audiences with FEE?

I’m not asking for your audience’s email or any personally identifiable information. Custom audiences are the aggregate collection of social media profiles which can be used to show Facebook posts and ads to individual users based on emails or website activity. This data is created by creating a custom audience in Facebook from an email list and/or adding a tracking code to your site. We would be sharing Custom Audiences as described by Facebook here.
Why would you want to share Facebook audiences?
  1. It doesn’t cost you anything, and your audience is never individually identified.
  2. You can share both email list (FEE has 100K active emails) and web audiences (about 700K Facebook users per month.)
How to get started:
  • If you already have targeting data via Facebook custom audiences and are ready to share it, we can exchange email and web audiences immediately.  FEE’s account ID is 25217845.
  • If you want to proceed with sharing custom audiences but don’t know how to get started, get in touch with me and my team will guide you.
  • If you want to know how custom audiences and retargeting works, I can share some resources with you.
  • Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in a general discussion of how FEE has grown traffic 3X in two years and 2X within the past year using innovative remarketing strategies.

P.S. In addition to sharing audiences, we also share content, with video cross-posting.

What is FEE’s digital marketing strategy?

FEE’s mission is ultimately one of marketing.  FEE does not do basic research or write academic treatises.  We do not contribute to academic journals or conduct economic research.  The intellectual foundation in support of a free society and sound economic principles is well established and our partner organizations do a great job of building on it.  FEE’s mission is to popularize a set of ideas: the values of a free market and individual liberty.  We must make effective marketing a core competency of FEE.

Strategy

Our marketing strategy has three elements:

  1. Create great content that engages, informs, persuades, and delights users.
  2. Distribute our content using the platforms that young people use.
  3. Accelerate our audience’s engagement with the liberty movement by promoting events, online courses, and program partners.

Core Competencies

In order to further this mission, FEE is developing a world-class technology and marketing platform based on the practices and tools used by top marketing agencies:

Inbound marketing: we leverage our vast catalog of articles, books, and media in new formats to draw audiences to our site and create more opportunities to create customers.  We have developed the capability for cost-effective social media advertising that pushes our content to audiences proven to best respond to our message.

Marketing automation: using tools such as HubSpot, we are building an automated conversion funnel, which automates personalized messaging workflows.  We infer our visitor’s goals based on their behavior, then send them personalized messaging.  For example, we capture visitors who are interested in events but have not applied, and keep them up informed about our programs.

Targeted messaging with data science: tools such as Parse.ly analyze all our content as well as the behavior of visitors to FEE.org.  We use data science analysis to create a personalized experience for each visitor to FEE.org.  Additionally, our editors see real-time feedback on how their content performs with each audience.

The goal of FEE’s marketing efforts is to be the most effective advocate of liberty ideas in the world, offer a compelling alternative to anti-market orthodoxy, and develop effective pathways to a deeper and life long commitment to the liberty movement.

How to enable cross-posting videos with FEE on Facebook

Cross-posting videos allows sharing Facebook Videos between Pages without re-uploading a duplicate video.  

Why would you want to cross-post with FEE?

  • Your videos get more exposure on other Pages
  • You control the content and description of the video (unlike re-uploaded videos, cross-posted videos cannot be modified.)
  • Analytics/Insights are shared with both the author and the page cross-posting the video.
  • FEE has a $2 million grant to distribute great content, and we are very, very good at distribution!

Tutorial: How do I allow another Page to crosspost my Page’s videos?

Step 1: Click on the Settings for your Pages, then Crossposting.  Now add FEE:

Step 2: Go to “Publishing Tools” then “Video Library” then Edit for each video you want to share:
Step 3: Enable cross-posting for each video you want to share with other pages:
 

How (and why) to use retargeting in your Facebook ads

A key part of FEE’s advertising strategy is retargeting our customers across multiple channels. Retargeting, also known as remarketing or behavioral targeting, is the practice in online advertising of showing ads to people based on their previous online activity. Here is how we do it:

1. Define Custom Audience

FEE’s retargeting is based on three data sources:

  • Website visits to specific domains or web pages. For this example, we are tracking visits to http://www.feecon.org/ via a Facebook Pixel tracking cookie. Some of our website audience originates on other organizations’ websites and are anonymously shared with us.
  • Membership in email lists, including FEE Daily or audiences shared with us by partners. (Facebook allows audience sharing without sharing any individual email addresses.)
  • Online and offline transactions. If you purchase something from our store, register for an event, or make a donation, you’ll eventually be imported as a Custom Audience for retargeting.

Here is how we’ve defined the audience for all FEEcon.org visitors during the last 6 months:

https://business.facebook.com/ads/manager/campaign/adsets/?act=25217845&columns=[%22name%22%2C%22delivery%22%2C%22results%22%2C%22reach%22%2C%22cost_per_result%22%2C%22budget%22%2C%22spend%22%2C%22stop_time%22%2C%22schedule%22%2C%22relevance_score%3Ascore%22%2C%22actions%3Alink_click%22%2C%22actions%3Aoffsite_conversion.fb_pixel_purchase%22%2C%22call_to_action_clicks%22]&pid=p23&ids=6065093699400&business_id=670229536476628

2. Create Saved Audience

We’ve created a custom audience of FEEcon.org visitors, but we don’t necessarily want every visitor in the audience to see our ads. In this step, we’ll exclude people who have already registered for FEEcon, and set an age range so we can create different ad sets based on age.

Below, we’ve included all FEE.org visitors, and excluded everyone who’s already registered and does not match the specified age range.

3. Use Saved Audience in Ad Set

Now that we have the target audience defined, we can use it in ads sets. I suggest that you create audiences before you create ads. You don’t want to spent a lot of time creating an ad only to learn that Facebook (or Twitter, etc) either cannot target the audience, or that it is too small.

The strategy below is the same as a traditional essay outline:

  1. Show an ad that tells the customer what they’re going to see 
  2. Show them the product on the landing page (and capture them via a Call to Action)
  3. Retarget them with an ad reminding them about what they saw.
This screenshot shows the four audience that we’re targeting:
  1. Young professionals (the audience definition actually has 12+ “secret sauce” criteria)
  2. Young people who already visited our landing page
  3. Current FEE supporters who might be interested in FEEcon
  4. Current supporters who have already visited FEEcon.org 

Conclusion: Why retarget?

What are we trying to achieve with this strategy?  Two things:
First, retargeting optimizes the return of our ad spend. Given a target audience, only 5% might be interested in the product we are trying to sell. We want to identify that 5% and spend much more effort converting them than the 95% who are not interested. 
Second, retargeting allows for creating a conversion funnel. People who are seeing our product for the first time should get a different message than those who are already familiar with it. In the ad for the first time visitor, I can direct them to more information, while the retargeted audience is already familiar with the product and can be asked to purchase it or offered a discount (since I can also exclude people who have already bought tickets).