A typical week at Pixel Kicks can see anything thrown at you. Writing tasks on subjects we don’t know anything about, slightly obsessive Twitter stalkers… One time even a mars bar went hurtling across the office, only to land in a glass of water.
When you’re at a family party of some kind and you have some distant relative asking you what your job is, answering “Digital Content Creator” inevitably leads to more questions.
“A digital what now?” is usually cried, with a few obligatory splashes of second-hand Strongbow hitting your face.
It’s usually easier to say you’re a journalist, although last time I said that, I was accused of writing anti-Manchester United articles in the papers, by a well-meaning football fan.
So, just what is a digital content creator? Well, the simple answer – we create content of the digital kind. Still not clear enough? Well, here’s what we get up to in a typical week…
Monday
Last year, we spent a majority of our time writing articles for our One Direction fansite (OneDirection.net) and our up and coming music, TV and celebrity gossip site OnePopz.com. Back in those days, we regularly ran competitions, and towards the end of last year, an obsessed One Direction fan followed us all on Twitter and kept tweeting us all with “goodnight” messages and photos of dogs, in an attempt to win. She didn’t win.
However, the first Monday back after Christmas saw us leave a lot of the old jobs behind. After many embarrassing moments of telling people we write for a One Direction fansite, we could start saying we were marketing a new concert ticket website. And, unlike the “I’m a journalist” response, we wouldn’t actually be lying.
We sat down on Monday to discuss the year ahead, and a majority of our time is now spent on SuprTickets.com promotion, although we still write the odd One Direction story from time to time. You can NEVER completely forget about 1D.
Aside from our Monday morning meeting, the day was focused less on work and more on caffeine. We started off the new year with an exciting addition to the team, in the form of a new coffee machine.
At the start of the day, we’d never previously ventured off the instant coffee we’d become used to. By the end of the day we’d lapped up a latte, marvelled at a mocha and concocted a cappuchino.
Our new years resolution for 2016 will be to curb the upcoming caffeine addiction.
Tuesday
Another day, another coffee. Well, three or four coffees. It was also the first full day where we didn’t completely focus on Harry, Niall, Liam, Louis and Zayn, and of course, we started to miss them.
This was the day that we were set to embark on promoting and marketing our new website. SuprTickets.com is a price comparison site for concert tickets, with a wide range of music and comedy stars available. Searching for who you want to see on stage brings up a list of their tour dates, and clicking through gives you a selection of prices that tickets are going for from different sellers.
This means that there’s a lot of data that needs checking. Who ya gonna call? THE DIGITAL CONTENT CREATORS.
Instead of doing the promotion and marketing half of things, we spent most of our Tuesday going through tour dates and seeing if any were missing or wrong. The website is still in its early days, so there’s bound to be a few errors that need sorting. Mainly, we keep finding tour dates that don’t exist. For example, 5 Seconds Of Summer performing at London’s The O2 on 29th May, instead of their actual scheduled date at Dublin’s 3Arena, just because it used to be called The O2 as well. This is because technology in 2015 isn’t yet advanced enough to realise some venues can share a name but be in completely different locations, or at least our developer tells me it’s something he’s “working on”.
Checking data isn’t actually fun, but surely things would get even more exciting the next day?
Wednesday
Wednesday was another day of doing something different. Getting involved with another side of the company saw us setting up a new client’s SEO campaign. What does this consist of? Well…
*Geek mode on*
Firstly we have to set the new project up in our campaign software, and add the already researched keywords for tracking. We also check we’ve got access to Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics, as well as FTP, CMS, and any other logins we’ve specifically requested. Then we record the following metrics in one of our many spreadsheets – PageRank, MozRank, Domain Authority, Page Authority, before recording a variety of on-site information like loading speed, markup validation, CSS & Javascript minification, meta tag readability and more…
*Geek mode off*
In addition to the SEO work, we were then offered the chance to write an exciting SEO piece for one of our clients. I volunteered. The subject? Wireless FM hearing systems.
Suddenly, I was back at school, doing some panicky last minute revision before going into an exam. Only this time the revision was research on something I don’t know a thing about, and the exam was a 750 word ‘essay’.
In all seriousness, despite the topic not being something within my hobbies, it was still some good experience, and it was an interesting day of being out of the usual One Direction filled comfort zone.
Thursday
Back to SuprTickets work on Thursday, and the day began with some ignored attempts at contacting fan sites for artists who head off on tour soon. It would be useful teaming up with them to collaborate on some promotional projects, but they don’t all seem to check their emails, so let’s pass on that for now. Of course, guest blogging is still a hugely important part of any SEO campaign, so I scheduled a follow-up email for later in the week.
Also, in an attempt to increase our social presence, we set up an Instagram account. Of course, the annoying thing about Instagram is that you can’t upload any photos on a computer – it can only be done via the app on a smartphone or a tablet.
Therefore, we decided to use a team tablet, which of course has been branded with the SuprTickets colours.
It’s been cool getting to do work based around artists of a slightly different genre than One Direction and the OnePopz usuals, instead getting to focus on Fleetwood Mac, Morrissey and the Foo Fighters, as well as writing a short article on the Beach Boys’ upcoming UK tour.
Friday
Friday is the day that most concert tickets go on sale, following recent tour announcements, so we usually spend the morning on Twitter. As well as tweeting about the tickets that are now available, we also look out for people who are sending tweets saying they can’t find seats at the gigs they want to go to. With a quick reply pushing them in the direction of our website, gaining us a click and a possible sale.
It’s also good to spend some time at the end of the week seeing if our work has proved successful. As well as using Google Analytics to see how much traffic the site had, and what pages users have been specifically browsing, we can also use an affiliate programme to see how much commission we’ve been earning, and what tickets have been sold with our help.
Overall, a busy but exciting week, as we began to focus our efforts on making our new website a success. Things haven’t moved incredibly quickly, but it’s only the first week.
Now, we’ll get into a new routine, and before we know it, we could have something very big on our hands.
MORE LIKE THIS
VIEW ALL
