Ooh, that’s a cheeky clickbait title, isn’t it?
It’s true, though - we have been hiding something from you at Mark Ellis Media, and I’d like to share it with you today because it's making me right proud, as they say up north.
Anyone who takes an interest in my YouTube channel beyond the topics of the videos may have noticed that I’ve started to use the words “us”, “our”, and “we” a fair bit. It’s no longer “my channel”; it’s “our channel”, and whenever I reveal a snippet of behind-the-scenes information, it’s made clear that I’m not the only one involved.
This is because it’s no longer yours truly pulling every conceivable string behind the scenes. In fact, if I count the heads of everyone who’s currently involved in Mark Ellis Media at the moment, they total 12.
A quick caveat. They’re not all full-time employees and not every one of those 12 people works solely for my business. But however much time they spend on Mark Ellis Media and no matter their role, they’re an intrinsic part of the team. These responsibilities cover everything from editing to brand partnerships, sponsor outreach, logistics, admin, bookkeeping, thumbnail design, SEO, and writing.
This brings me to the thing I teased at the start of today’s newsletter: my website.
Sorry, our website.
If you weren’t aware, at the very same time I spun up the Mark Ellis Reviews YouTube channel, I did the same thing with an identically named website. For nearly four years, I was the only contributor to what was an editorial website built by yours truly and hosted on GoDaddy. To this day, it forms an integral part of the video production process; nearly every video you see on the Mark Ellis Reviews YouTube channel starts life as a blog post on the website.
Since 2023, markellisreviews.com has undergone significant changes both in its design and the technical underpinnings (and, yes, that meant getting shot of the truly awful GoDaddy hosting service). It has also amassed a small team behind the scenes - and on the front line. We now have additional writing talent, an SEO consultant who is basically the Rolls Royce of SEO Consultants, and someone who’s in charge of the technical under-the-hood stuff.
Externally - beyond the site redesign which has been more iterative than wake-up-and-everything-looks-The-Verge-different - you wouldn’t spot that much has changed, beyond a couple of new faces appearing as authors against articles. Trust me, though - a lot has changed and continues to change every single day. Most of that stuff is technical SEO, but some of it spills into page design and the team’s approach to writing and structuring posts on the site.
This, as you might expect, doesn't come cheap. The business is investing considerably in an asset that isn’t generating enough revenue to cover that investment. However, that’s how businesses are built, and I’m firmly of the mind that we’re now turning what was once a one-man-band-blog into something much bigger and with a much brighter future. This means that the payback doesn’t happen overnight, and that requires some serious faith in the people you’re hiring to do the right job.
The good news is I’ve somehow amassed a wonderful website team (with help, of course - I couldn’t find all of these people on my own). I’m also extremely excited about where the website is headed. We’re batting in a massively competitive niche, yet, somehow, we’re often found playing with the big boys in search results for key search terms. The SEO work and increased writing effort that’s taking place without me lifting a finger will take us to another level - of that I’m certain.
Why am I doing this? It’s simple: the website is the only content asset we own. We don’t own the YouTube channel or its audience, nor our Instagram account, or the 40,000 followers we’ve amassed on TikTok. All of that stuff can be taken away from us if the platform that does own each asset decides it should. No one can take our website away from us. It is, therefore, the most important content asset we have to hand.
Here’s to a very bright future for markellisreviews.com. Oh, and if you’ve contributed to the traffic we receive daily, I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you, because we literally couldn’t do it without you.