Lifestyle Website: COS Compass
COS Compass is a lifestyle site of which I’m one of the creators. Its purpose is to be an entertaining and useful resource to residents and visitors of Colorado Springs. Many of the monetization strategies involve collaborations with local businesses, so the main aim is to gain as much traffic, credibility, and loyal readers as possible.
My Main Contributions
User Persona Creation
Starting off, we obviously wanted to know our audience. So I performed qualitative and quantitative research to determine two primary personas:
- Lindsay Local
- Tom Tourist
Website Design (Adobe XD)
Based on needs of the user personas, I created low-fidelity wireframes to map out the structure that would be most pleasing for them. Next, I created a responsive high-fidelity prototype to view how different screen sizes would remain consistent.
Website Development (WordPress/Elementor)
I’ve worked as both:
- A marketer who needs to change content constantly
- A developer who has to manage the code of complex sites/apps
Because of this, I’ve become a big fan of the Elementor page builder in WordPress. It’s powerful enough to customize to the liking of my dev half, and it’s easy to add and edit content as a marketer.
I’ve worked with a lot of different CMS’ and page builders, and the WordPress/Elementor combo is my favorite.
SEO Strategy
I created a comprehensive SEO strategy around this site. Essentially, the first phase of the strategy boils down to these few main points:
- Creating topics based on needs of one or both of the user personas
- Find keyword searches for which we’re likely to rank at an early stage
- Build a content calender to ensure consistent posting for these topics/keywords
The strategy will be revisited once enough content has been created to show that these topics (and similar) have relevance for the purpose of this site.
Additionally, the site was developed following SEO best practices, and content is created with this in mind.
Content Creation
Following the content calendar created with the SEO strategy, I also create various pages/posts on the site.
My process is the following:
- Determine the keyword strategy and outline based on the SEO keyword and goals of the post
- Conduct research for any information needed
- Combine research and the outline to create an incredibly detailed outline
- Use AI for writing assistance to craft a detailed article (using a custom-developed prompt), and then copyedit what it creates
- Input the content (text, pictures, etc.) and follow an extensive on-page SEO checklist
Following all these steps ensures that the content is high-quality, consistent, and maximised for SEO purposes.
Social Media Management
In developing the social strategy for these personas, I decided to focus on three main channels:
Instagram: The aim here is to encourage user interaction in an inspiring way. It will be mix of informative posts (with caption), original photos/videos (by the COS Compass team), and reposting quality images/videos of others who are in the target market. The goal is to gain followers by exposure that comes from re-sharing, and to keep followers with informative content.
Facebook: On Facebook, we will be primarily sharing our recent posts, and sharing posts of local businesses/groups. We will also tag relevant businesses in our posts, in the hope that they will reshare and/or contact us for future collaborations.
Twitter: The Twitter strategy is very similar to Facebook, except we will be attempting to engage in more dialogue with local businesses and influencers.
