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The year was 2012 The Avengers had just been released and the idea of Fyre festival or influencer marketing was about 5 years away from being a big thing. I had more or less stumbled into my second business segwaying from streetwear apparel to online media and was generating hundreds of thousands of website visitors every month. Generating those traffic numbers at the time seemed relatively easy and my strategy seemed simple enough but what I did not know is that just 5 years later it would be called influencer marketing and be both a blessing and a curse to the social media world.
Origin Story
At 20 years old I had just moved to Portland, Oregon and was working for one of the “big four” banks when I decided to jump into the world of apparel buying some tee shirts and calling myself a clothing company. This could be a whole story in itself but this is really where I got started with web development and social media marketing. After a few years I hit my goal of selling my shirts to someone on every continent and managed to amass a moderately following of around 10,000 people on Facebook.
Early on I was lucky enough to get some press from apparel websites that focused on streetwear. No matter how small the website was if they published anything about me or my company I was eager to share it, this is where I had a kind of “Ah hah” moment of realizing the best way to advertise my self may be to advertise other people. A few weeks later I had my own media site focusing on streetwear and pop culture called “Rude Magazine” ( these were definitely my blunder years ).
The Strategy
My initial strategy with this website was to have a 50-70% filler content about pop culture related stuff then another 30% to be focused on interviews and streetwear reviews. The idea was to become an authority in the industry that I was selling in and using the site as a hub to market my own company. This worked out mostly as planned, I would interview people who had their own streetwear brand and eventually got to talk to bigger companies like Rip n Dip & Diamond Supply, these brands would then share links to the articles driving traffic.
Pivoting
Things were going alright and traffic was around 20-30k a month which was really respectable for someone who at the time did not know much about SEO or Digital Marketing. As the site got more popular we had more types of people reaching out to us about being featured or interviewed. I think by the time I caved in and said yes on a non apparel interview I had gotten around 20-30 emails from various models, rappers and DJs until finally someone with a respectable following reached out to me.
I did our first non apparel interview with a model and mostly ran through the typical types of questions along with some fun ones. This particular model had a good following of around 30-40k and the deal was that she would post the article 2-3 times within the week. This worked out great and we got a decent bump in traffic, after that I made a list of people I wanted on the site that had a larger following. I would slowly work my way up and ensure every new person we interviewed had a larger following than the last to the point that we were featuring people who had 500,000+ fans.
The outcome
This was before anyone charged for posting stuff on Facebook and for about a year it brought in large amounts of traffic. On average putting someone with 500,000 fans on our site and letting them share the interview across different social media outlets would give us some big bumps in traffic. After this we knew our demographic would be males between 18-30 and tweaked our content to be more generalized. At our highest month we reached 500,000 unique visitors from our influencer marketing program. This was short lived shortly after Facebook changed their algorithm to decrease organic reach to around 6.5%.
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