So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?

Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).

WooEverything

I don’t know whether you have noticed, but we try to use the word “Woo” in as many ways as possible in our every day activities. Since WooThemes is essentially a CamelCase word, we like to combine other words in a similar way i.e. WooTeam, instead of WooThemes Team. Similarly, we have Affiliated Woo Workers, which reinforces the “Woo” branding again.

We don’t do this to be redundant, but we do sprinkle a good few “Woo”‘s in there to reinforce our brand and make sure that it is consistent throughout most of our marketing campaigns & user interactions.

The Ninja

Another one of these elements that I think have become synonymous with our brand is the inclusion of the WooNinja (see what I did there?) as much as possible; in most cases, we’ll find a way to include the ninja and work our branding / marketing around that.

The WooNinja is at least somewhat of a novel idea and I think the way we’ve used it – and how we have made it part of our core branding – appeals to our existing & prospective users. The most important thing about the ninja’s inclusion though, is that our visual branding also stays consistent, which means that the brand as a whole can grow on people much easier (consider that people are naturally averse to regular change).

Take Away

Whilst it’s not gonna help you to “Woo” your own brand with ninja icons, consider the two points that I’ve mentioned above to build your own brand.

Proper branding is about creating a consistent, trustworthy, accessible & fun brand that will appeal to your customers and non-customers alike. And if it helps to include a little mascot to achieve that goal, then you should seriously consider doing so.

What we’ve found though is that irrespective of implementing specific strategies; it has been our persistence that has paid the biggest dividends in our growth over the last 12 – 18 months.

So what is this persistence that I’m referring to? Well, basically it’s just deciding on a plan / strategy and then sticking to your guns in executing those decisions – even if you can’t necessarily immediately see the effects of those plans. Here’s a few reasons why persistence pays off…

1. Persistence leads to improvement. By continuously working away at your ideas and building your business, The natural result of this is the fact that you’ll get better at what you’re doing, which means your products / services will improve. It also goes without saying that improved products / services are much easier to take to market…

2. People love companies that work hard. I think people actually notice a strong work ethic and in this regard, they will recognize one’s persistence. This obviously also bodes well for after-sales service, which is becoming much more important than the initial product / service that the customer purchased.

3. People like to be reminded of awesomeness. The conversation with your customers should never come to an end, as people ultimately love to be kept up to date, and essentially stay in touch with what their favourite businesses are cooking up. If you’re not gonna tell them; nobody is.

4. Staying Visual. You need to make sure that your business and marketing efforts are constantly in front of the eyes of existing & prospective customers. The more visual and accessible your brand / business is; the more likely those customers will be spending money with you.

This has most definitely worked for us and we’ll continue to tweak our approaches, try some new strategies, but ultimately stay as persistent in our execution & implementation of these. This is the only way we know how to market WooThemes and from our success and growth, we’d probably be mad to change any of that just yet…

What’s your take on this though? Do you find our persistence to be a vital cog (as this post suggests) in our marketing machine? Have you seen other companies implementing a similar approach?

And we believe we’ve been relatively successful, considering that our unique visitors are up 16% and pageviews, 25% from June to July. Also, if you look at the following two traffic graphs, you’ll see that the incoming traffic line is a lot flatter in July compared to June. Weekends will obviously be more quiet, but the aim is to even get visitors to your site then…

June traffic showing considerable decreases in traffic over weekends

The traffic graph for July shows a much more consistent, "flatter" line

*Yellow lines above shows the days on which we published new content.

In June, traffic on the weekend dropped about 22% (per day) in comparison to the average weekday, whilst we managed to decrease that to about 14% in July. That means we’ve already gotten a 36% improvement in just one month! Here’s how we did it…

1. Publish regular content

Seems like a silly thing to say, but most people ignore this. We’ve tried to publish content regularly during the week and then at least once over a weekend. Also – instead of publishing 2 / 3 posts on one day, we’re spacing that out to different times during the week, which means that the site is getting more clicks & pageviews on an increased amount of days.

2. Publish often

This may also seem kinda obvious, but the more fresh content you add to your site, the better your chance to improve your traffic stats. In July we published 18 new posts on the WooThemes blog, compared to the 15 in June. So whilst not a massive difference, the 3 extra posts definitely brought in additional traffic and pageviews.

3. Engage your readers

Here the aim is to ensure the reader actually comes back to the same post a few times, because they’ve left a comment and want to continue to conversation. Looking at comments on WooThemes, we managed to go from 378 comments in June to a whopping 669 in July. So assuming that increased conversation is directly related to increased pageviews, engaging content is a definite if you’re keen on getting a steady influx of traffic.

4. Be interactive

We’ve found that posts with voting polls or another element of user feedback works great, because you are involving the reader and in this way they have a kind of “stake” in the outcome of that post (meaning they might come back to check up on progress or an end-result).

5. Split posts into 2 (or more) parts

Another way of ensuring multiple pageviews from the same user, is to split posts into more than one part. Not only does this add value (since the content is more), but when the first part is very good, you’ve sold the user and you’re assured of getting that second click on the next part in the series.

This is a good recent example: We show you teasers – Part 1 & Part 2.

6. Contests & freebies

Nothing beats free stuff and it definitely has a very positive contribution to a site’s traffic. One of our recent competitions (it had two parts as well) really upped the traffic on the blog last week, whilst the icons freebie on WooCamp has gotten almost 4500 unique visitors to date.

7. Publish at appropriate times

Check where the majority of your web traffic is coming from and publish posts during work hours in those countries, not in the middle of the night, since your content then gets lost on Twitter (i.e. most people don’t check past tweets the next day). Alternatively, tweet about your content twice during different times of the day, so that all your potential users will see the tweet / link.

8. Interlinking

We’ll finish off with another rudimentary tip, but one that is often neglected. I think we’ve managed to use quite an efficient strategy now, whereby we link to content on the WooThemes blog from WooCamp and vice-versa (this would’ve been evident from above as well). You’re not also pushing your content to the reader in this way, but you’re actually providing contextual, additional value to the reader.

We’d love for you to try these out on your own websites sometime; whilst we won’t make any concrete promises, we can assure you that if these tips are executed properly, you’ll definitely see an increase in your traffic. We’d also love to hear from you with regards to ideas on how we could take this up another notch!