This is an interview (Bright Bull's Online Community Stories) with Simon Corbett, founder of Global Dating Insights and Jargon PR, about building a B2B community around the online-dating industry. Simon describes starting eight years ago by identifying a niche with little trade media, launching a WordPress site, hiring a full-time editor and publishing focused content (fraud, monetization, payment processing). The content-first strategy led organically to a sold-out first conference in London and sponsor interest; key tactics include niche focus, format differentiation (short talks + networking), and tracking engagement KPIs (traffic, newsletter sign-ups, time on site). Simon reports growing to ~30,000 monthly visitors (community scale) and a PR agency now doing ~£2M/year in fees with ~40 clients and a 20-person team.
Chapters
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Bright Bull's Online Community Stories series. And this is an online version where we are interviewing thought leaders, entrepreneurs and inspiring individuals that are running, building and growing communities, especially within the B2B media and events industry. And we, we really like to share and dissect how this kind of inspiring individuals are building these interesting and exciting communities and monetizing those communities in various different ways. For episode four, I'm very excited to welcome Simon Corbett, who's the founder and CEO of Global Data and Insights, as well as the founder and CEO of Jargon pr, a very, very successful PR agency. And interestingly enough, Simon and his business on Jargon have been in the news very recently because they're essentially going places. And the story that Simon's going to share with us today is how he built a community of 30,000 people per month visiting the website from scratch. So I'm really hoping to, for Simon to share a lot of his kind of interesting information about how he's done it, what were the kind of winning stories, horror stories, and hoping that that's going to be very useful for you if building communities is something that you're going to be working on moving forward. So without further ado, Simon, how are you? Welcome.
Thank you. I'm very well, thank you. And pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Exactly. So, Simon, do you want to just give us a little bit of an introduction about yourself or about Global Dating Insights and then we can start from there and hear the story? How did it all start?
Yeah, sure, no problem. So I've been in PR. I've been in public relations for around 20 years. I did 10 years at the big agencies in London and then started my own about 10 years ago. And jargon PR today we do a little over 2 million a year in fees. We've got around 40 clients. We've got 20 people in the team and it's a really good, solid, growing agency. We have a second business called Global Dating Insights, which started eight years ago and which is, as you said, is focused on the online dating industry and has got quite a strong community. And it started around eight years ago. We had an online dating client at the PR agency and, and we started getting interested in that industry and realized there wasn't really any trade media in that market and no one was really doing conferences or events or certainly not very well. And we thought there's an opportunity here. My background in pr, I know media and conferences and events very well, although I must admit I didn't know a lot about the online dating industry and that was where it all began.
That's kind of interesting. So what we're hearing is that like you receive this client in the dating industry, Very likely we also in the event industry start doing some research. Okay, let's see who are the key partners that we are going to be able to amplify the message for our event. So you found that there was basically an evident gap and then suddenly, and then that's kind of how it all started. So how. Tell us, tell us the story about like so idea. Bingo. This is what, this is what we're going to do. And how did it all, how did it all begin? Tell us the steps that you went through on that process.
Had the idea was the first thing and then just began looking into it. And I don't know if you remember, online dating about nine or ten years ago had a horrible stigma. It was all a bit nah. And it just wasn't cool. And we came into the industry at the time, it was sort of getting cooler and people were meeting online and it was quite socially acceptable certainly in London anyway to talk about that. So we began looking and researching all the big online dating companies internationally and the sort of media coverage they were getting and events they were speaking at. And as I said, there was nothing particularly for the industry. So set up a website, came up with a name, Global Dating Insights registered some domains, got a WordPress site going and invested in an editor, so a full time journalist to begin writing copy. So that was where it started and we wanted a lead with value, lead with content, lead with material and news that I would want to read if I was in the industry, whether it was fraud, scamming, monetization, payment processing. What do people that work in these big online dating businesses need to know and want to know? So that was where we started.
So you've basically decided, okay, we're going to go in with content based approach, let's not complicate matters, let's just get the domains, just get the website up and running as quick as possible and let's just start putting content out there. So pretty much top of the funnel scenario community where you're like, let's just make sure that we get enough coverage around certain areas, around certain topics, around that. Did you conceive or did you know that Global Data Insights was going to have events, that they were going to have webinars or anything like that? Or how was that process at that point in time?
So how we were going to make money was always an obvious and big question. And conferences were always top of mind, but we didn't realize quite when and where and how and what geographies. And I didn't really know I had the idea, but there wasn't any meat on the bones, to be honest. So we got going and then after a few months we started to build up relationships with all of the big online dating companies and all of the big suppliers to the industry. And we were doing news and interviews and it was great. Webinars weren't. We weren't doing a lot of those back then. At the start we weren't doing podcasts or the virtual events that are now commonplace. So we started with just sort of written content and then we had the idea of putting on our first conference in London and that was in September. And we started around six months earlier. And we looked at some venues, some very nice five star venues, reached out to the dating companies and said, would you like to come and speak? And the agenda pulled itself together and then we put some tickets on sale and before we knew it, we'd kind of sold 150 tickets. We sold out the place and then sponsors began to follow very quickly after. Right.
So it's very interesting. So it seems that everything started pretty much organically. So you start putting content out there. You started basically. Did you have a sales team in house or was that kind of part of the role of the editorial person or were you doing sales?
I was doing sales. So we had one full time editor. So he wrote the copy, he wrote the articles, he did the interviews with the CEOs and executives of dating companies and he did all that. I looked after money and that, that basically involved finding sponsors for the, for the conference. And we were very lucky because I guess two things. The first is that they, they liked our content, they wanted to engage with us and talk to us and they knew we were turning out good material. And the second thing was there wasn't really a, anyone else of, of what I would consider quality in the market some bits, but it wasn't where it needed to be for an industry this size. So they were the two things that really went in our favor as we started.
So I think that's kind of a very good position because essentially, so if you're putting out content, people are kind of say from both sides, end users as well as potential sponsors or technology vendors in this space get that attention that okay, these guys are doing something interesting. Then you plug in that kind of collaborative environment where they're kind of letting you know what's probably what is it that they need or what is it that they want to see from both ends and, and then you have that ability and that agility to start kind of creating that. That's pretty interesting. So in if, if you were kind of talking to another, let's say an event organizer that is looking and thinking about building a community, especially with the characteristics of yours, top of the funnel, what would you say again would be the first steps again? Obviously getting the editorial content, but what would be kind of the KPIs or milestones at that point in time, especially when you're focusing on adding value first?
I'd say the first thing is niche. So find a community, find something unique. It's the niche. The more unique the better and the easier in my mind. Secondly, make sure you've got something differentiated to offer. So if you're just doing the same stuff other people are doing, it might. Whereas if you can find a unique angle or a unique twist or a different way of presenting things. And we did that with our conferences. We have the way we structure the days. We have a lot of very short presentations. So we have quite a number of smaller 10 or 15 minute ones and then a break. So when everyone else does sort of 30, 40 minute chunky stuff, we do quick, short, sharp. And so what that means is if you're sitting there in the audience and there's something you're not interested in, it's it's over pretty and equally it means there's a lot more speakers, there's a lot more diversity, there's a lot more topics and content you can cover. And I think as long as it's broken up every hour with time for coffee and some networking, that it's a different format to what most organizers do. So that was how we, we looked at it in terms of niches and differentiation. And in terms of your question about KPIs, I would say for us, we looked at engagement on the website, we looked at traffic, we looked at visitors. Are we putting out stuff that people want to read? Was really the start. And then are those numbers growing of the more people signing up for the newsletter, are the social channels getting more populated? Is the average time on the website increasing? And we didn't really have any numbers of what success looked like. It wasn't we need to be on for 3 minutes and 20 seconds or anything. We just knew we wanted them to increase and keep going. So that was, that was how we looked at it.
Right. So let's say like what would you say obviously, eight years after. What would you say is in a B2B environment, when you start putting content out there, what would be like, what would you suggest would be the first milestone in terms of, let's say, visits or traffic to a niche B2B website?
