The tweets are drawn from coverage of five discussion sessions at the camp, one by me, two by Tom O’Malia of the USC Marshall School of Business, and two led by guest faculty at the camp: Mark Potts and Rusty Coats. You can find links to many of the presentations at the camp on the KDMC website.

Robert Niles on The News Publisher as Community Organizer:

“When the music stops, always have a chair” – @robertniles at #kdmccamp
@michelemclellan

#kdmccamp “I am an entrepreneur today because I am the only person who would hire me”–@robertniles
@susanmernit

#kdmccamp wise words from @robertniles on moving from reporter to publisher as journos develop web media projects
@susanmernit

#kdmccamp Great discussion on how to identify community needs and opportunities in local communities @robertniles
@susanmernit

“As an entrepreneur, the status quo is your enemy” — You need community to turn to you and dump the status quo — @RobertNiles #kdmccamp
@ojr

“Model the behavior you want from your community” emphasizes @RobertNiles #KDMCcamp
@kdmc

#kdmccamp @robertniles recommends every online publication have a #facebook page cc#mybxb
@michelemclellan

#KDMCcamp QA: What is the most important analytic? asks @robertniles. A: MONEY!! #mybxb
@susanmernit

Mark Potts on Show Me the Money:

Execution [is] more important [than] a good idea, talent attracts capital – Mark Potts #kdmccamp
@michelemclellan

What’s your value proposition: What problem do u solve? You’d better be able to answer that – @pottsmark at #KDMCcamp.
@ojr

Non-profit is a tax status, not a business model, says @pottsmark. Thank god someone said it. #kdmccamp
@kimbui

Non-profit is not a magic bullet. You still need to go out and raise money. – @pottsmark #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Adapt, iterate your biz model until it works. You learn something from every pitch. Refine, try, refine, try…#KDMCcamp
@kdmc

Potts: Problem w/ newspapers wasn’t giving content for free, it was giving away advertising for free. #kdmccamp
@PattersonFdnNMJ

Don’t feel nervous about pricing your ads. You can negotiate down, but not up. Ask 4 what u can with a straight face. @pottsmark #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Campers urged by @pottsmark not to overlook advertiser services (data, social media help), mobile services, events, classes. #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Look for incubator opportunities, also local govt aid/loan programs for small biz. @pottsmark #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Rusty Coats on Non-Profit $$$exy :

Nonprofit doesn’t mean non-revenue. You’re still a small business. You still need sustainability @rcoats #kdmccamp
@ojr

Hearing about the underpants gnomes business model from @rcoats #KDMCcamp. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBiSI6OdqvA
@ojr

If you are 70-80-90% grant-funded, you’re sitting on a one-legged stool. @rcoats #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Non-profits can take advertising through underwriting messages, but there are rules about what those ads can say. @rcoats #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Underwriting ads must stay away from calls to action, pricing and comparisons. @rcoats #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Underwriting is capped at 30% of revenue for non-profits. @rcoats #KDMCcamp
@ojr

If you want to take advertising in addition to underwriting, the non-profit publisher has to pay taxes on that ad income. @rcoats #KDMCcamp
@ojr

@Rcoats: Sustainability is the new hotness within the foundation world. #kdmccamp
@PattersonFdnNMJ

Advice for non-profits and for-profit start-ups: Get an advisory board to help you. #KDMCcamp
@ojr

If you don’t take revenue seriously, kittens die – @rcoats final thought at #KDMCcamp
@ojr

Tom O’Malia on Sales, Part One:

Repeat after me. Customers are people who are willing to pay you – stresses Tom O’Malia #kdmccamp #mybxb
@michelemclellan

Tom O’Malia #kdmccamp laying out the importance of QUALIFYING customers as first step in effective sales. AMEN!
@susanmernit

Brilliant lesson from Tom O’Malia on how talking to customers to find their pain can help provide you leads to grow your business. #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Tom O’Malia – Elements of a business are Customer, Benefit, Money (and customer is not the reader) #kdmccamp
@michelemclellan

Tom O’Malia says news entrepreneurs are scared to “think customer” #kdmccamp #mybxb
@michelemclellan

Until you determine $X for each transaction you do, you’ll never know how much you can spend. – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Commandment of entrepreneurship: ‘Thou shalt not BS thyself’ – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Great source of start-up funding: Secure a first customer before launch. – Tom O’Malia at #KDMCcamp.
@robertniles

Tom O’Malia on Sales, Part Two:

God made everyone great salespeople, because we have two ears and one mouth. Listen 2X as you talk when selling – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Step 1 in selling: Set up meeting in advance Tom O’Malia at #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Step 2 – Qualification. Find who in customer organization has the power to make a decision. – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Step 3 didn’t come through – Determine their need. Find what they need that you can deliver. Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Step 4 – Sell your company. Tell abt success. Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Step 5 – Tell about ability to fulfill their need. Are you right for them? – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Step 6 – What do you need to do to get the order? (i.e. ‘If we can do it, can you buy?’) Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Look for hidden objections: ‘Can you think of any reason that would stop you from buying our solution?’ – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Final message in sales call: “I’m excited, and when would you like me to be back here?” Get the commitment – Tom O’Malia #KDMCcamp
@robertniles

Because these campers are in the process of developing their entrepreneurial ideas, we are not webcasting the proceedings. But there is one way to follow along, and share in some of the learning that’s happening at the camp. Just follow the #KDMCcamp hashtag on Twitter. That’s the tag we’ll be using during the camp to tweet out interesting nuggets, lessons and wisdom that camp faculty and participants think will be of most use to the journalism community.

Here are a few of the lessons offered, from the first day of the camp:

- Advertising isn’t simply a source of revenue to you, the publisher; it should provide a benefit to the advertiser.

- If you can’t define the benefit to the advertiser – your customer – then you’ll never make a sale.

- Non-profits must be able to define deliverables to a sponsor or supporter, just as for-profit news sites define deliverables to their advertisers.

- Selling isn’t the act of presenting something, it’s the act of qualification.

- You’re not pushing something unneeded onto an advertiser when you sell, you are finding the advertisers who need the benefit you provide.

- You should listen two times as much as you talk to find out what someone’s willing to pay.

- “Tell me one thing to do that would make your life better.” Make that a required line in any pitch to an potential advertiser or supporter.

- If you meet customer needs, the money will find you.

If these are the sort of items of advice you’d like to hear more of, then, please, do follow the #KDMCcamp all this week. We’ve got a great line-up of faculty and alumni panel speakers coming – including Susan Mernit, Mark Potts and Rusty Coats. We’re having some great conversations at the samp, and we’d love to welcome you into them via Twitter.

Any journalist ought to know that your stories are only as good as your sources. Start with bad information, and you’ll deliver bad information to your readers.

Running a news publication is like that, too.

If you don’t go into publishing with good information – about your market, your environment, your legal and tax requirements – you’ll soon find yourself wasting an enormous amount of time learning what you should have known from the start. And that’s time that you could have spent building your business.

A news website is a business – even if you’re running it as an official non-profit or an unofficial haven’t-made-a-profit. At the very least, you’ve invested your time in whatever you publish (or hope to publish) online. That time deserves the respect of a decent return on that investment, whether it be financial or something else.

Simple business education can help you get the most from your investment of time and money in online news publishing. You don’t need to go to graduate school for two years to earn an MBA. But you do need to talk to some folks who know what they’re doing in this space.

Like you did when you were only a reporter, as a publisher, you need some sources.

“Entrepreneurship is network dependent,” teaches Tom O’Malia, the USC Marshall School of Business professor who’s helped us develop the KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. “Without a good network, an entrepreneur cannot succeed.”

That means that you need to talk with other folks who are running news websites – whether they be small, one-person blogs or major-metro newspaper dot-coms. You know journalism. But do you know how to find a foundation to fund your start-up? Do you know how to select the most lucrative ad network? Do you know how to ask for – and close – an advertising deal for your website?

Do you know how to make a budget for your news website? How to promote your site and increase the audience and page views that you’ll need to make it attractive to either advertisers or non-profit funders?

What do you know about the business of making a living when someone else isn’t writing you a weekly paycheck?

This is what your network can teach you. And with that knowledge, you’ll have the freedom to create and publish a news website that fulfills your vision for what your journalism career ought to be.

Too often, journalists get into website publishing naively, thinking that long hours and hard work will help them get ahead. Don’t get me wrong – long hours and hard work are requirements in news publishing. But those alone won’t get you anything but frustrated and deeper in debt.

You need to plan and spend time developing and cultivating your personal network of teachers, advisers and confidants in order to have any real chance of success as a news publisher.

That’s why I’m urging you to block out some time tonight and on Friday to complete your application for the 2011 KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Go to website. Read what this program offers. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to instantly build a network that can help you learn what you need to know to make a start-up news publication financially and socially successful.

You want to have an impact in your community. You wouldn’t have gotten into journalism if you didn’t. And you want to make enough money in this business to keep food on the table and a roof over your head. You don’t need to have an employer to do that, though. Invest in building a network of colleagues who know the way, and you can become a successful news publisher, too.

The deadline to apply for the 2011 KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp is Friday, January 14 Saturday, January 17, 2011.

And that’s… attitude.

Too many people in our industry, from publishers to cub reporters, are wallowing in a culture of failure, bringing a fatalistic attitude to their jobs, one that has been and will continue to become self-fulfilling.

Journalists’ bad attitude toward their business manifests as whiny entitlement: People should communicate online under our rules; Readers should pay more for our reporting; Online publishers (in this case, Julian Assange) should play nice to the powerful like we do, too.

Winners make money and differences in peoples’ lives. Losers make excuses. Which do you want to be?

Sure, you can find (at least temporary) comfort in the familiar. Keep working on traditional, quote-three-sources-including-one-elected-official, inverted pyramid, newspaper-style stories. Maybe add a part-time blog on the side, to feel “hip” and score some points with your boss. If you get laid off (or fear you might be), send clips and resumes to other newsrooms. If that doesn’t elicit a job offer, look for a j-school faculty gig. Keep attending the same industry conferences, networking with other newsroom journalists, to commiserate about how tomorrow just doesn’t look or feel like the good old days.

People who follow this path are simply trying to run out the clock on their career: trying to make it to retirement before they’re forced to make any substantial change in how they work or what they do.

Do you really think you can make it? Even if you do, is that really how you want to live?

You don’t have to live in a culture of failure. You can leave the journalism industry that pines for the past to join a journalism industry that engages the market as it exists today – one where publications are building income, and influence, along the way.

You won’t be the first journalist to do this. That means that others are available to help show you the way. But you’ll need to start listening to these new voices, and tune out the pessimism, frustration and even scolding you might hear from the colleagues you leave behind.

So here is where I make my pitch to you: Come apply for our 2011 KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. It’s an intense experience that will help you develop the skills you need to succeed in this new journalism industry. It will help you see that our industry is not one that’s failing, but one that’s being failed by ignorant management and inflexible institutions.

You don’t need to be their victim. You can be the leader of new journalism publication, one that makes a positive difference in its community while providing you will the livelihood you need.

We won’t help you do this by trotting out the same speakers and voices that you’ve been hearing at journalism industry conventions for years. We’ll be at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, hearing from business school faculty – people who have built multi-million dollar businesses with less money up front than you spent on dinner last night.

The journalists you hear at this camp will include boot camp alumni, individuals who’ve taken what they learned at the camp and built functioning publications that are supporting themselves (and, in some cases, multiple employees). This boot camp isn’t about learning the theory of entrepreneurship – it’s an online and in-person blueprint for how to do this yourself.

And it’s free. We’ll even help cover part of the cost of getting you to LA in May for the in-person week that wraps up the camp.

I’ve been publishing my own websites since 1996. I’ve been working full-time for myself for nearly three years. And I’ve never had more fun in the journalism business than I’m having now. My income went up in 2010, not down. I am so thankful to have found a way out of the culture of failure that imprisons so many others in the news business. I just want to help other journalists find their way out, as well.

That’s why I’ve worked so hard on developing this boot camp, and why I hope that you will take the time and make the commitment to apply for it. Here’s the link. The deadline is Friday, January 14, 2011.

Got questions? Hit the comment button below. We can’t wait to see you at the camp.

We’ve been talking about entrepreneurial journalism here on OJR for longer than just about anyone else. And not just here on the website – we’ve been showing readers in person how to launch their own news businesses, too. We hosted our first conference, devoted specifically to entrepreneurial journalism, back in 2006. For the past two years, we’ve worked with our new home at the Knight Digital Media Center to create and present the KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. This week, we open the application process for next May’s camp.

If you’re thinking about starting an online news business, or looking to take your start-up to the next level, trust me, you need to apply for this camp.

As helpful as I hope our articles have been for you, there’s simply no replacement for in-person, one-on-one, personalized instruction. That’s what we offer as part of our boot camp, and it’s a uniquely valuable experience that you don’t find at many of the other industry conferences and gatherings devoted to entrepreneurial journalism.

Here’s what we offer with the camp, and it’s not just one week in Los Angeles. Our camp experience starts nearly two months before you come to LA. You’ll study online with Tom O’Malia, professor and entrepreneurship expert in USC’s Marshall School of Business, who will lead you through a pre-camp curriculum to prepare you for the decisions you’ll be making on your entrepreneurial journey.

You’ll also get to know, and work with, your fellow campers. Success entrepreneurs draw upon their personal network, and we’ll help you build yours through this experience.

Where you arrive on-site in May, you’ll join your fellow campers at the USC Marshall School of Business, where you’ll hear from our camp faculty in morning instructional sessions. After lunch, you’ll have opportunities to meet individually with faculty members for personal coaching. We’ll break down your ideas and help you rebuild them into a feasible business plan.

In the evenings, there’ll be no trips to Hollywood and no tours of downtown LA’s nightlife scene. You’ll work – hard – on completing the tasks we challenge you with each day.

Do you know the difference between audience and customers? Do you know the steps in organizing a community? Do you know how to test the feasibility of business idea?

We’ll show you.

Here’s what we’re seeking:

• People with journalism experience. (If you’ve not worked in news before, then this isn’t the camp for you. We’re not looking to train entrepreneurs in journalism.)
• Passion for your community.
• People who are cool with math and technology.
• People who get energized, not drained, by work.

Does that sound like you? If so, please, consider applying today.

Don’t listen to the skeptics. You can do this. People are making money online. You can be one of those who are, but you need the training, the techniques and the support that success entrepreneurs possess. Let us help you get there.

The camp starts Sunday afternoon and runs through Friday morning. I’d like to invite you to follow the action through Twitter – we’ll again be using the hash tag #uscnewsbiz. The events themselves will not be webcast, as the participants will be discussing their business ideas and concepts and we’d like to afford them a bit of privacy as they develop those. But summaries of the various talks and discussions will appear over the next week or two here on OJR, as well as on the KDMC website. I hope that you’ll follow along.

Even though the physical event begins this Sunday, participants have been working up the camp for the past several weeks. Tom O’Malia, Director Emeritus of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School, has put together an online instructional course for the participants, to help them begin to learn some of the business concepts behind what they’ll be doing as the develop their online news initiatives.

Changing attitudes is key. Too many journalists fail as publishers because they can’t stop thinking and acting solely as reporters or editors – to stop thinking as employees and start thinking as business owners. Once you make that mental change, though, the next step is to cultivate a habit of lifelong learning and training, to develop the full range of skills that you will need to build a community of readers and customers, to cover that community, and to secure the income that you will need to make your business sustainable over a long term.

Those are the topics that we’ll be covering, in person, at the camp next week. We’ve brought some great speakers and instructors to the event, including Susan Mernit, Lisa Williams, Tracy Record, Ben Ilfeld, Tom Davidson and more. We’re also bringing back two of our alumni, Rita Hibbard and Bargain Babe Julia Scott, who will share their journey from last year’s camp to their current work.

As I said in my introduction to last year’s camp, we need to pry journalists from the culture of failure that’s evolved around the news business. Opportunities abound in the information business. So, please, follow us on Twitter during the event and on the websites after… and join us on this journey.

That’s right, we’re doing the camp again. The Knight Digital Media Center, in cooperation with OJR and the Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at USC’s Marshall School of Business as well as the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, will select a dozen or so journalists to travel to Los Angeles in mid-May for the camp. There, you will work together and in one-on-one consultation with camp faculty to hone plans for your project – and its financial success.

Lots of other journalism organizations have jumped on the entrepreneurship bandwagon recently. But long-time OJR readers know that I’ve been writing about entrepreneurial journalism for years, and that OJR put on what may have been the first industry conference solely devoted to the topic, back in 2006.

The KDMC Boot Camp is different from other industry gatherings, as well, in the one-on-one work it provides with accomplished entrepreneurs. This isn’t about bringing together a bunch of newspaper-industry executives to speculate about online entrepreneurship during one-way lectures. Like the medium you’ll be publishing, in this is an interactive experience.

During the last camp, USC Marshall’s Tom O’Malia, a successful entrepreneur and author about entrepreneurship, and I met with campers individually each afternoon, helping them refine their concepts and their pitches – to potential funders, advertisers and readers.

We helped them to see the difference between an audience and customers and to wrap their heads around what they’d need to do to begin a successful journey toward entrepreneurship.

We’re adding an extra day to the camp this year, and will be using that time to work with campers to develop additional “take aways” – marketing, advertising and/or grant application templates that they can use to help earn funding for their businesses, the moment that they step off the plane.

I’d like to invite all OJR readers to apply for the camp. The application will be available on the KDMC website. If you’re unsure about applying, I’d suggest you start thinking about two questions:

1. Why are you a person capable of starting a business?

2. Why are you a person capable or organizing and cultivating a community online?

If you have positive answers to these questions, you could be a strong candidate for the camp.

To conclude, another question for you. We’re working on the details of this year’s curriculum, and would love to hear from you names of individuals you’d like to see as faculty for the camp. Who are your role models in entrepreneurial journalism? From whom do you wish you could learn something – in person and one-on-one – about starting a business online? We’ve had success in bringing some of the top names in journalism and entrepreneurship to the USC campus over the years and would be happy to invite the folks our potential campers want to see. Drop names in the comments, or by clicking the “Contact” link at the top the page.

And if you think that you should be one of those speakers, please, don’t be shy about stepping forward and sending your name to us. This camp provides a great opportunity for those who’ve had some success in this area to help ensure the survival of good journalism online by training other reporters and editors to make the step up to publisher and business owner.

But it isn’t. All that’s doomed is the reactionary management philosophy of monopolists who could not adapt to world where people, not papers, controlled the narratives of their lives. Good riddance, I say. Journalism is not doomed; people can make money publishing online. All that needs to change to make that happen is journalists’ toxic attitudes toward themselves and the value of their work.

That was my message to the participants at the Knight Digital Media Center News Entrepreneur Boot Camp this week. We met at the USC Marshall School of Business for five days, working through a curriculum outlined by myself, KDMC’s Vikki Porter and Tom O’Malia of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Marshall. We brought in a team of four faculty to finalize the camp’s curriculum and instruct the campers: Mary Lou Fulton, Susan Mernit, Ken Doctor and Vin Crosbie. And we supplemented each day with expert speakers, including SEO expert Danny Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, entrepreneurs Shoba Purushothaman and Staci Kramer, and attorney Michael Overing.

Every day, the campers started by giving us their “elevator pitches” for their projects. Over the week, the pitches sharpened from rambling four-minute speeches to tight engagements of 20 seconds or less. At the same time, they learned how to flesh out their pitches into five-minute multimedia presentations, which they presented Thursday morning to a panel of business finance experts, including Lloyd Greif.

The camp wasn’t just about pitches, however. It was about changing minds. We wanted the campers to see themselves not as beaten-down employees in an ailing field, but as sharp thinkers, entrepreneurs in a thriving marketplace.

To that end, we held the camp at the business school, not the journalism school. At USC, like on every other campus I’ve ever visited, the difference between the journalism school building and the business school’s is like the difference between a Ramada and the Ritz. Environments can change attitudes. The physical building is one part of that. The company ones keeps the other. We aimed to change both.

Did we succeed? We’ll have to wait to discover how many, of any, of the projects developed by these 15 campers become financially self-sustaining. But we did see the campers’ attitudes change. They talked less of the past, and more of the future. Discussion turned from excuses to suggestions.

They smiled more.

Following morning presentations and discussions, led by the faculty, we broke after lunch into small groups, with individual campers meeting with the day’s instructor, O’Malia and me, by request. Those sessions were the most exciting, engaging and fulfilling of the week, for me. That’s where we got the opportunity to fine-tune ideas into concepts that had a real chance to succeed in competitive information marketplaces.

I’m not going to get into specific detail in describing individual projects – I’ll leave the campers to debut their own works. One moment stood apart for me, though.

One of our news entrepreneurs was pitching her site, “Do you have enough money?” she asked. It was an engaging, exciting pitch, one that would entice any reader to visit her consumer advice website.

But I told her she was doing it wrong. Citing O’Malia’s admonition to “target the customer,” I asked her how much money her readers would be paying for the site.

“Nothing,” she replied. “The site is free.”

So they’re not writing the checks, I responded. Who is, then? I asked.

“The advertisers.”

So who is your customer? I asked.

At that moment, she changed her pitch. “Does your business have enough customers?” she then began. With her business focus broadened from building audience to building audience to attract advertisers, she’d learned how expand her concept from that of a journalist-editor to a publisher-enterpreneur.

Before any old-school journalism purists protest, let me assure you that audience remains paramount. A website has no value to anyone, not advertisers nor the public interest, if no one reads it. In my experience, and the experience of many others in this field, publications built solely to appeal to advertisers often fail to catch on with readers. Without a loyal audience, those advertisers soon lose interest in the site and withdraw their support.

Kicking off the camp, USC Annenberg’s J-school director Geneva Overholser warned that journalism has been too bound by rules from previous era. “We need to keep the principles, not the rules,” she told the camp participants. Obstinate devotion to an old-school advertising/editorial wall that keeps journalists from understanding enough about the business side of the industry to make a living on their own is one example of a rule that needs to go, she said.

Telling journalists “you can’t do that,” when they seek to find a way to make their work profitable, or at least economically sustainable, is an example of the culture of failure from which we were trying to extract these 15 journalists. I want more journalists to get the message – you can do it.

USC executive in residence David Westphal (Overholser’s husband), tweeted during the final pitch session, “KDMC bootcamp presentations are at the intersection of great public-interest aspiration & the marketplace. (Good place to be)”

One of the industry professionals on the Thursday morning panel that heard those final pitches sent off the campers with a strong endorsement.
Angel investor Bob Aholt, a director at the Pasadena Angels said, “Before I came here today, I was concerned about the future of journalism” in this economy.

“But after hearing these presentations today, I see the fate of journalism is in good hands.”

You can follow our Tweets about the camp using the hashtag #uscnewsbiz on Twitter.

I’ll write more about the camp, which ends tomorrow, with a wrap-up on Friday. But today, I wanted to dive into one important topic that we covered in a dinner conversation on Sunday evening.

Our invited speaker was Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, and a long-time expert in search engine optimization [SEO]. Danny’s a news entrepreneur himself, having grown his 1996 Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines into two online news publications. (He also maintains a blog at http://daggle.com/, which I recommend for his sharp observations of the online news business.)

I asked Sullivan to come speak to our campers because of the importance of SEO to any boot-strapped online start-up. With few resources to draw readers to a new website, SEO provides start-ups a low-cost opportunity to get their site’s links in front of an interested audience. The only cost is the time to learn these tips, and the effort required to implement them.

Effective SEO not only causes your website’s pages to rise in the search engine’s results pages, it can help you make money, as SEO can help search engines tailor better targeted and more lucrative ads on your pages, should you participate in their advertising syndicates, such as Google AdSense.

Most of these tips are Sullivan’s, rephrased and with summaries of observations from me and from other camp participants included.

1) Use Google AdWords’ keyword tool to find the most popular keywords related to your website and your beat

Before you begin tuning your specific key words and phrases, you need to discover what key words and phrases Internet readers are using in search engines to find content like yours’. Google’s various keyword tools can help you do that. The AdWords tool will show you the approximate number of searches conducted on Google for words and phrases that you enter, or for phrases associated with a URL of your choosing.

Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool quantifies the popularity of various key phrases, with both search volumes as well as suggested advertising bid prices to “buy” those keywords through Google’s text-ad program. That last bit of information can show you not only which key phrases will drive the most traffic to the site, but which will drive the most lucrative traffic to you, as well.

Use the tools to identify the best overall phrases for your site, the ones that you will use in the site’s title and on its home page and navigation. Then, use the tool to build experience that will help you select the best key words and phrases to spotlight when writing and producing individual articles and blog posts on your site.

Google’s home page provides guidance, as well, as Google now suggests various keywords and phrases – and reports their popularity – based on the partial search terms you type in its entry box.

2) Use key words and phrases in your HTML title tag

Once you’ve identified your keywords and phrases, use them in the most importance place where search engines will consider them. The search engines give the content of the title tag the greatest weight of any single element on the page, so your most appropriate key phrases better be there, Sullivan said.

If you are using a content management system [CMS], know which input field will populate the title tag (usually the headline). Use the resources above to determine which words ought to make it into that headline. Imagine yourself as a reader, and ask what terms you would use on Google if you were searching for this story. Those terms had better be in your head, and page title.

Also, be sure to use powerful, popular keywords in the title, description and tags of your videos you post on YouTube and elsewhere online.

3) Write an engaging meta description tag for each page

Sullivan, and others, find little SEO use for the plethora of descriptive meta tags that can be included in the head of a webpage. But the description tag still provides good value, as Google uses it to create the short blurb that it displays under a page’s title on its search engine results pages [SERPs]. A sharp description can help lure a visitor to your site over others, including ones that rank ahead of you on the page.

4) Switch from AP style to “SEO style” on references in body copy

Keyword repetition and density on the page still play a role in where you end up in the SERPs (though not nearly as much as in the pre-Google era.) You can help yourself, therefore, by moving away from rigid AP style rules on second references and place names to more SEO-friendly use of full names on some (but not all) subsequent references within a story.

5) Use keywords in your URLs whenever possible

The search engines value the use of keywords in URLs, as well. If you’ve got one in your site’s domain, great. But keywords in the directory path or file name of the URL provide a boost, as well. Rather than use numbers or nonsense text in article URLs, opt for a CMS that uses real words, ideally keywords for which readers will be searching.

Sullivan also recommends that you configure your CMS to use hyphens instead of underscores to separate keywords in your URLs.

6) Never publish the same article under two or more URLs on your site

Duplicate content penalties have killed news websites’ positions in the SERPs in the past. You shouldn’t publish the same article at multiple URLs on your site. It’s fine to reference one piece with multiple tags and from multiple index pages, but they should all point to the same, single URL when referencing that story or blog post.

Much of Google’s decision on where to rank a page in the SERPs is based upon the number and quality of links to that individual page. Concentrate the in-bound links to one story on a single URL. Posting that content on multiple webpage addresses simply dilutes the power of all those links across those multiple URLs.

7) Create standing pages as linkbait for popular ongoing stories and issues

This extends the point above. In an ideal world, you would concentrate all the inbound links to a story you are following to a single URL, driving it to the top of the SERPs for all related searches. But that’s tough in a traditional news publishing environment, where each day brings a new article, with a new URL. Staff-written summary wikis and well-crafted index pages can provide a standing URL that others can link when referencing your coverage of a particular person or issue, boosting the search engine popularity of your work.

8) Never retire or change page URLs without providing a 301 redirect

Search engines respond to a variety of responses from a Web server when a search engine requests a URL that no longer exists. A “404″ or page not found response is the worst response your server can deliver. It should, instead provide a 301 redirect, which tells the search engine to which new URL it should transfer the old URL’s SERPs position. Here’s how to do a 301 redirect in several CMSs and scripting languages.

9) Use bit.ly or other URL shorteners that use 301 redirects and provide click stats when posting to Twitter

When you are using URL shorteners, you want to make sure that your site is getting the search engine “credit” for that link, and not the shortener itself. Sullivan suggested bit.ly as one of several services that use 301 redirects, and after trying it, I’m impressed with the click-through statistics it tracks for each URL I shortened through it.

10) Link to other great, original content and invite other publishers to link to yours

The last advice might be the most important. Great on-page SEO ultimately will do little to move your pages up in the SERPs if other websites are not linking to you. Use your social media and offline promotional skills to let other influential online news publishers know about your work, and invite them to link to it. Tweet your posts and write them with enough flair that others will want to retweet.

Of course, the best way to encourage others to link to you is to practice what you ask, and to link to them and their best coverage.

Finally…

For WordPress users, Sullivan recommended the All in One SEO Pack as an effective plug-in that can address several of these points on their WordPress sites.

Sullivan also advised not to worry about article length, after one camp participant asked. Article length, if it does affect SERPs performance, doesn’t count nearly as much as these other factors.

In general, don’t sweat other details when worrying about SEO until after you’ve addressed these basic principles in improving your website’s search engine performance.

I’m excited about a project that OJR is launching, along with our new hosts at the Knight Digital Media Center. In 2006 and 2007, OJR hosted one-day conferences at the USC campus for online news entrepreneurs, and I’ve been wanting to expand on those programs, to offer more in-depth training and development for online journalists who are building the news organizations of today and tomorrow.

Now, it’s going to happen. Below are the details, from the KDMC:

The Knight Digital Media Center in partnership with USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Center for Communication Leadership and the Online Journalism Review is accepting applications for its special News Entrepreneur Boot Camp to be held May 16-21, 2009, in Los Angeles. This intense one-week boot camp is designed for 12 competitively selected digital entrepreneurs with great ideas for community news and information initiatives in the public interest. Topics to be covered include:

• Identifying the best business model for sustained success.
• Developing a sustainable business plan.
• Marketing and audience development.
• Content production and management models.
• Legal and tax issues.
• Identifying capitalization sources.
• Developing and implementing revenue and advertising strategies.
• Successful social networking models.
• Selecting and implementing technical platforms.
• Understanding and using metrics.

Traditional news organizations are floundering as business models collapse and audiences are increasingly turning to alternative news and information sources. This special boot camp is designed for digital journalists and others who are passionate about new ideas for serving the information and news needs of their communities but who lack the grounding in business and startup skills. Expert faculty from both academia and the private sector will provide intense instruction, coaching and mentoring on developing marketable business plans for providing news and information in the public interest.

The Knight Digital Media Center is a partnership of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

WHO SHOULD APPLY: Successful applicants will provide a concise and clear proposal for a digital initiative that services specific community news and information needs and will meet the following expertise criteria:

• Digital fluency. Must be able to independently create and manage digital content in an online environment. Most important, must understand technology as tool and online as a community.
• Business/math aptitude. Must be comfortable and competent in math and business environment.
• Topic Expertise. Must demonstrate experience/expertise in targeted topic/service area.
• Collaborative. Must demonstrate previous experience in working productively with others on projects requiring innovation.
• Value-driven. Must be committed to values of accuracy, balance, fairness, credibility, inclusion, transparency and public service.

WHEN AND WHERE: May 16-21, 2009
Los Angeles, CA

HOW TO APPLY: Applications must be submitted online at http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/boot_camp_applications/.

DEADLINE: Monday, February 16, 2009

I will be there, as part of the faculty for this event, and I hope to see some of you there, too. We’re looking for people who are passionate about the communities and topics that they cover and know that they must offer a website that collects and presents information in a fundamentally different way than news organizations did in other media in the past. (After all, if the old way worked today, some news organizations wouldn’t be teetering on the edge of collapse.)

Please consider applying for what I know will be an outstanding event, and the beginning of a productive ongoing relationship with KDMC and OJR for the participants.