How Monster uses “How Now Wow” content to boost traffic

Margaret Magnarelli

Anastasia Dyakovskaya of NewsCred interviewed Monster.com managing editor Margaret Magnarelli about hits news content strategy.

Dyakovskaya writes, “In just two years, Margaret Magnarelli, Managing Editor and Head of Content at Monster, has helped catapult the site’s viewership to 43 million unique visitors and 96 million pageviews in 2016 – an 18 percent increase over the previous year.

“Her six-person team – consisting of three content managers, one video producer, an operations manager, and a writer – publish 10 to 15 content assets per week. In addition to boosting traffic, they’re responsible for increasing job searches from entries initiated from a content page by 18 percent, and boosting new accounts created from content pages by 116 percent.

“How do they do it?

“With a little help from a formula Magnarelli developed, called ‘How Now Wow,” which breaks down content into three categories: utility, news, and highly shareable and entertaining.

“‘When I came up with the strategy and it had rhyming words, I was very proud of myself,’ Magnarelli says.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.