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- “Quality content published in some significant quantity, and engineered to be easily found in search engines, is a recipe for a successful digital publishing business.”
- Capture new online readership with useful and engaging tags
- Good writing still prevails
- Analyze what your readers like and don’t like, then do more of what they like
- Fundamentals of building online audience:
1. Tracking your content
2. Web analytics
3. Search engine optimization
4. Effective headline writing for the Web
5. Distribution through social media
Measuring journalism:
- Newsrooms now track and measure everything they do
- Essential to competing
- Producing work product on regular schedule vital to business
- No business, no paychecks
Track all that you publish:
- Productivity is one of the key measurements for managers
- Tracking content published is a smart business strategy
- Easiest way to track is with a Web-based spreadsheet; updating the information can be distributed; spreadsheet will do math for you
How to set benchmarks:
- Create benchmarks that become goals to aim for
- After tracking content, goals should evolve to include other measurements like audience numbers, revenue and audience satisfaction metrics
- At Google, they call this process OKR, “objectives and key results”
- Most important metrics are revenue and unique users
- Establishing benchmarks and goals done on a case-by-case basis
- Goals should include more than numbers of pageviews — Are there new advertisers? Is the audience happy?
Track your audience — to know what your audience is consuming:
- Use Web analytics software to track Web site traffic
1. Commercial systems charge monthly fees but allow real-time traffic
reporting
2. Free programs provide detailed traffic reporting but update only once
every 24 hours
3. Built-in tools offered by the content management software or hosting
service you’re using
4. Google Analytics: free Web-based tracking service almost as powerful as
any commercial traffic service
5. Clicky offers a low-cost service that will give you real-time tracking
6. Check out Site Meter and StatCounter
- Identify key data points — measurements that give you the best gauge of how
site is performing
1. Pageviews: the total of Web pages viewed in a given time period; how
content is ranked in terms of popularity; if site is supported with
advertising, this is also directly related to the inventory the site has
to offer prospective advertisers
2. Visits and unique visitors compared: visits is the number of times
everyone accesses a Web site; pageviews divided by visits equals
average number of pages viewed per visit
3. Engagement and referrers: engagement is the amount of time spent on
the site by each user; tracking referrers tells you where your traffic is
coming from
4. Context and perspective are important when you use Web metrics to
make journalistic decisions
Search engine optimization (SEO):
- Understand search engines
1. Spiders and robots: small computer programs sent out by search
engines to crawl the Internet and track and record information found
on Web pages; programmed to look for new pages or new information
and send back reports for indexing
2. Indexing: larger programs that take information sent from spiders and
robots and build large database files with references to all the content
connected to the right links; catalogue of the Web
3. Queries: when you type a keyword search into the home page of a search
engine you are making a query of that search engine’s database; the
index is searched for the most relevant results for your keywords
- SEO for journalists:
1. Search engines rank results, usually displaying 10 results per page
2. Google gives more importance to a Web site that other sites are linking to
— phenomenon called “Google juice”
3. Majority of Web searchers don’t go past first page of results, so having
your Web site among first 10 helps grow your audience
4. If journalists understand the basics of writing search engine-friendly
headlines, they can drive more audience to news and information
Use SEO to grow your audience by putting words on your Web pages you think a prospective reader would type into a search engine while looking for an article on that subject
- Grow audience with content and links:
1. Content is king
2. Linking is queen — make anything important a link off the home page
because search engines give greater values to those links
3. Make sure your links make sense — use descriptive links
4. Title tags — search engines give a lot of credence to them
5. HTML meta tags provide information about Web page that doesn’t
actually display for the user; good idea to put a few relevant
keywords here
Grow audience with video SEO:
1. Video is the largest audience growth segment
2. Newspapers’ effectiveness at making video content available in
search engines “nowhere near their potential;” also perform poorly
in social media sites
3. Lack of on-site search engine to distinguish, filter and display video
content leads to a “video ghetto” that can make video difficult to find
on many news sites
- Write effective Web headlines:
1. Basic SEO is the conduit between an audience and content
2. The secret to the power of the headline and why it determines the
effectiveness of the entire piece — on average, eight out of 10 people
will read a headline, but only two out of 10 will read the rest
3. Thought and strategy must be put into headline writing
4. Write for readers and robots:
* For readers: Web headlines should be simple, literal and direct; must
motivate readers to click the mouse
* For robots: if headline contains search keywords repeated elsewhere
on the page, the story will aquire more Google juice and return higher
on search pages
5. Make good headlines better:
* Keywords — write for readers with Google in mind
* Use conversational langauge — be direct, focus on the unique
* Don’t be afraid to inject a little attitude — be fair, not boring
Use social media as distribution channels:
- Target specific channels: commenting and linking are effective ways to get others to view, link and comment on your journalism and become part of your community
1. Blogs: read and contribute to blogs that write about same things you do
2. Flickr, YouTube, etc.: follow channles and streams of people who post
content related to what you cover and link to them on your site
3. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.: make sure people can get your news
through these popular platforms
4. Digg, reddit, Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.: social news and bookmarking
sites can provide significant short-term boost in traffic; converting them
into loyal audience is challenge
- Increase social capital:
1. Journalists earn social capital — becoming the trusted center for a
community — by engaging in multiple channels
2. Participating in social media forces you into having a two-way
conversation
3. Social media puts a face on a news organization
4. Reminds readers journalists are part of the community
5. Those who can build bridges back to the community they cover have best
chance of increasing their audience
Track, measure, distribute, adapt:
- Helps you discover new stories and provides more context for your journalism
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