Today was a big day in publishing. It looks like the Chicago Tribune is going bankrupt, and the Miami Herald was put on the auction block by cash-starved McClatchy. What does failing conglomerates mean? Opportunity!
The problem with printing is that they are stuck in a model. For years, newspapers focused on Classified ads to make the majority of their of their money. Then, Craigslist. Since then, Newspapers have been drowning, trying to figure out how to make money. The obvious place would be the internet, but for those of you who have tried to monetize content online, you probably know, most articles cost more to produce than they pay. That is online. So, I’m not going to offer you a 100% fool-proof solution to monetize your magazines. But I will tell you what I’ve done to drive traffic up, increase page-views, and reduce bounce rates on a couple of my sites which has helped us make a bit more money.
1. More Traffic
So you want more traffic to come to your magazine or Newspaper website? That’s great. It’s going to take some work though. Now, you can buy ads on adsense or adgarden, or wherever you want, but there are also some great free ways to increase traffic. Buy the ads after you do the free stuff.
First, you need your website to be search engine friendly. When Google comes a-crawling, you want the little spider to be happy. What does that mean? You want the spider to do as little work as possible. You want him to run by each page once, and you want him to get there without even trying hard. And so, while, I know it can be tedious, I am prescribing a wee bit of SEO my friends. If you are running your magazine on Wordpress, than there this SEO Guide kicks butt. Just follow the instructions and you’ll have happy little spiders running around your site in no time. If you are running your magazine on something a bit more robust, than the Yoast SEO guide for Wordpress is a good starting point for learning what you are going to have to do with your site. Luckily, bellow are a list of suggestions.
1. Short, informative links :-)
I cannot stress for you how important short links are. A lot of people don’t put as much stock in this as I do, but I promise you, short, informative links are important. I know Google puts a lot of stock in titles on pages, but trust me, links are more important than I ever realized. Right now, The Brown Spectator is ranked in the top 5 or so links for “Morse vs. Frederick”. Why? Well it wasn’t like that until I got rid of the date-based permalink structure and changed the url to thebrownspectator.com/morse-vs-frederick-bong-hits-4-jesus. Google really likes it now.
2. Make Your Titles Good! (Duh)
A lot of people like to put the name of their blog in the title followed by the name of the article. No! Bad dog! Flip it around. You want the title of your article to precede the name of your blog. On that note, make sure your articles are named something makes for good link bait. Like I said, Google puts a high priority on titles, you should too.
3. Meta Data
For some reason, even though it’s a bit anachronistic, search engines still put a little bit of weight on the meta data. So, get some meta data, and add it to your header. The best metadata is metadata that is custom to the article. The first few words of each article probably won’t cut it.
5. Cache stuff
Why would you make your poor server generate the entire contents of every page every time someone visits your site. Dude, cache your shiznit. It’s really easy. If you’re using a CMS, there will be a plugin that handles it for you. And besides, spiders like spending as little time on each page as possible. That means it’s good for you to make sure each page loads uber fast.
6. Reduce Duplicate Content
That doesn’t mean that you need to go through your site and delete all the times that you repasted an old article. My guess is that you haven’t really done that. What this means is that you need to reduce the ways in which a person (or a spider) can get to any article. You want them to have one, efficient path to each and every article. This can be accomplished using rel=noindex or nofollow tags effectively.
2. Pageviews
Ok, this is going to make a lot of people really angry. But seriously, split big posts into multiple pages. I know, everyone has really strong opinions on this. But look, if you are the webmaster for a website with a lot of longer content, not only does it help split big articles up, it increases pageviews, which is necessary for monetization. Give your readers a fair amount of text on each page (somewhere’s about 500 words), and then split the text. I hate to say it, but if readers refuse to click on “next page” links, news and magazines, even online, just won’t make it under the current ad model. I think that the ad model needs to change, but, that’s just the truth. As it is now, one of the easiest ways in which a website can increase their pageviews/visitor by 2 and sometimes 3-fold, is simply by splitting articles up.
Bounce Rate
1. Get visitors to sign up for your email updates. I use feedburner to manage my site’s email updates. Recently, just as an experiment, on the Spectator, I put a bar on top of each article inviting people to sign up for the email update. Since I did that, the email list has quadrupled. Those visitors will not only be back, they will reduce my bounce rate. Seriously, they are the people who will sit on your site and read every new article you’ve put out. Those are the visitors you want lots of. They are valuable assets to an online publisher, which means that they are the ones who your advertisers will want to target.
