While Building Digital Brand 7 Mistakes to Avoid

Finding a balance is essential.

Not finding a balance between quantity and quality. The quantity of stories published every day is important for bringing in traffic–but so too is the quality of those stories. You don’t want to just publish a bunch of aggregated stories or just a couple of really high-quality stories. Finding a balance is essential.

A few years ago, Mental Floss received a mandate to publish 50 stories a day, which we did. I would argue that the quality of those stories was still high, because each one went through at least two rounds of editing, including fact checking.

But we found that because we needed to get up that much content every day, we were featuring stories that perhaps weren’t the most on-brand for us.

(Also, it was exhausting!) Since then, we’ve scaled back, and have hopefully found a balance between the short, newsy stuff–which we always try to add a little something extra to, rather than simply aggregating–and the more in-depth stories we know our readers love: long reads, big questions, strange history, informative lists, etc.

Not knowing what your brand is. It seems like a bit of a “duh” thing, but knowing what your brand is, and who your audience is and what they enjoy, is key to a website’s success.

Whenever we’re assessing a story, we ask ourselves: Will someone feel smarter after reading this, and walk away knowing something they didn’t know before? Is it a story they’ll want to share with someone else? Does it help tell our readers more about the world they live in? Is it a little quirky, and does it make us feel good? Not every story we run will check all of these boxes, but each one will check most, and that’s how we know it’s “Flossy.”

(Occasionally there’s a story where we can’t articulate why it’s Flossy but we just know that it is–it has that little je ne sais quoi that makes it a Mental Floss story.) We say no to a ton of stories that just don’t feel quite like us even though they might get clicks, because protecting our brand is important.

Read more: https://www.inc.com/quora/7-mistakes-to-avoid-while-youre-building-a-digital-brand.html?cid=search