All of the radio tips apply to TV, too. But on television, you’re adding a visual element to your presentation, one that can undermine your message if you don’t take the time and make the effort to work within the opportunities of the medium.

So prepare as you would for a radio interview – know your “talking points” and have those easy-to-remember facts and anecdotes ready. Warm up, but keep your cool when you’re on the air. And follow these tips, too:

As a journalist, you learned how to cultivate sources. As a publisher, you should apply that skill in cultivating relationships with other media outlets, as well. Your colleagues in radio and television can help you spread the word about your publication, and your credibility as a voice covering your beat. I hope you’ll embrace these tips to help you present yourself even more effectively through radio and television.

In my experience, many reporters freak out at the thought of becoming a source. Especially a source on camera or on a live mic. But you don’t need to be nervous or feel intimidated. You’re a communications professional, after all. If you feel comfortable asking questions, you should feel comfortable answering them, too.

Or, at least, you should feel comfortable with learning how to answer them. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, and next week, here on OJR. I’ll be listing some of my tips for writers and editors who need to appear on radio and television to promote their work. We’ll start with radio today, and add some television-specific tips next week.

First, you need to get the gig. Use the contacts you’ve built during your career. If you’ve got a project, a site or a book that you think would be of interest to the audience at a particular show, reach out to the people you know at that program and offer yourself as a guest. Keep the focus on the audience, though. Don’t “pull strings” or call in favors to get on shows where you or your work isn’t a good match. That won’t help you build readership or sales, and will only damage your relationships with colleagues. (Not to mention their relationship with their employer. No one wants to be the one responsible for booking a bum guest.)

Next week: Tips for handling a TV appearance.

Let’s start with this post from author Joe Konrath, about his experience transitioning from a traditional book-publishing contract to self-publishing e-books.

“With self-publishing, in a single month,” he wrote, “I was able to earn the same amount of money it took me four and a half years to earn through traditional publishing.”

He crunched the numbers:

So far this month, I’ve sold over 18,000 ebooks on Kindle.

When I include Smashwords, Createspace, and Barnes and Noble, my income for January will be about $42,000.

Last January, I made $2,295 on Kindle, and I was amazed I could actually pay my mortgage on books NY rejected.

“Amazed” is no longer strong enough a word.

In just 12 months, I’ve seen a 2000% increase in income. And ebooks are still only 11% of the book market.

What happens when they’re 15%? 30%? 75%?

And yet, I still see some writers clinging to the notion that getting a book contract with a Big 6 publisher is the way to go.

But money isn’t the only reason ebooks self-publishing is preferable.

Konrath goes on to detail the thousands of hours he spent driving to bookstores around the country, chatting up customers as he tried to convinced anyone to buy his books. His publisher didn’t want him to tour – since that would require paying bookstores – but without a tour, he couldn’t connect with consumers.

I’ve heard from friends in the book business that publishing deals are getting even worse for authors: less promotion, less support and small advances and payments.

Konrath chose not to accept the decline of his career. Instead, he chose to self-publish, using low-cost e-books instead of the expensive, but more traditional, print vanity press.

The how-to of self publishing e-books would provide enough material for many, many other columns. So let’s leave this with the recognition that by rejecting a traditional career model, and becoming the publisher he used to work for, Konrath not only saved his career, he advanced it to a level he’s never come close to enjoying before.

Contrast his attitude with the writer of this post: Who would want to be a travel writer?

Today in 2011 it is almost impossible to be a full-time freelance travel writer unless you have a private income. Many of my contemporaries – well-known journalists and authors – have gone part-time, topping up their income writing corporate brochures, leading tours or – in one case – renovating bathrooms. Others have given up altogether.

On the other hand, it’s a lot easier today to become a travel writer. When everyone has a blog there is no difficulty in getting published in the first place. And there are countless opportunities to see your name in lights – providing you don’t mind working for free.

The author here seems unable to conceive any way for a travel writer to make an income other than getting a commission from a newspaper or magazine travel editor. He dismisses authors who write their own blogs as “working for free.”

I’m biased here because I earn the bulk of my income as… a travel writer who publishes his own blog. The four-figure payments deposited into my account each month are quite real, thank you.

I don’t write for free. I write for myself.

To ensure that the second statement doesn’t equal the first, I have to do the work of a publisher in addition to the work of an author. That means building a website (or buying a block of ISBNs, if you’re to publish e-books), then finding an audience and building demand.

If you’re not willing to do that work, and instead insist on waiting for someone to cut you a check before you put hands to keyboard, well, good luck chasing those dwindling advances and commissions.

The irony? Those who put in the work of building a business often end up with more time to do the writing that they love. As Konrath wrote, he doesn’t have to press the flesh at bookstore any longer. He doesn’t have to devote time to promotion. With his social media support having reached a tipping point, he can spend more hours writing.

I’ve found the same in talking with colleagues who are still pursuing freelance work. They spend hours of extra time for each piece they write networking with editors, writing pitch letters, reviewing contracts and filling out various publications’ expense forms. I just write stories – what, when and how I want.

While some lament the loss of secure employment for a handful of writers, I’m thrilled to live in an era when anyone with the will to write and drive to connect with a community can earn a living, without having to wait for some editor’s approval.

Being interviewed is part of the duties of a successful website publisher – you’ll need to know how to promote yourself and your publication in other media, to increase its exposure and drive new traffic.

To that end, I want you to watch this clip from one of the masters of entrepreneurial self-promotion:

Sure, Dolly Parton is on the show to talk about her support for LGBT youth. But notice how she slipped in a plug for every single project she has going currently? Her new musical, her single with Queen Latifah, her Dollywood theme park and her chain of Dixie Stampede dinner shows. She plugged ‘em all.

That, friends, is a pro at work.

But let’s also notice three important points about interview opportunities:

1) A plug is not your pitch

Parton didn’t launch into a 30-second pitch for Dollywood when she mentioned her Tennessee theme park. She simply name-checked it. Too many sources blow their plug by talking too much about the project. If the moment’s right later in the interview, you can talk in more detail, but initially, it’s enough to just work in the name.

2) Look for the right context to bring up your projects

Which brings us to the second point. You’ve got to work your plugs into the context of the interview. Though the topic of interview was acceptance of LGBT youth, Parton expanded the topic to include race in order to work in a vignette spawned by a plug for her project with Queen Latifah. That provided the plug with the context that made it seems a natural part of the interview, and not a forced promotion for something which didn’t relate.

Same with the plugs for Dollywood and Dixie Stampede. Parton worked plugs for those family attractions into the context of talking about her extended family.

If the context isn’t there, you can’t make the plug. So, sometimes, as Parton did, you need to steer the conversation a bit to set up the plug. Steer it too far off topic, though, and the plug won’t seem natural or authentic and – unless you’re on a live broadcast interview or online chat – won’t make the cut into the story. And you likely won’t be inviting back for additional interviews, either. Ultimately, you’re there to advance the story. Plugs come within that context, or not at all.

3) Pronouns are your enemy

When you’re talking about your publication, never fall into the trap of using pronouns to reference it. The majority of your references should use the name of the site. Sure, you’ll need to use pronouns now and then to keep from sounding like a shrill shill, but many journalist/publishers are so sensitive to that risk that they take it too far in the other direction, and neglect to ever mention the name and URL of their site.

We’ll be talking more about promoting the news in future weeks on OJR. But I’d love to hear some of your tips, in the comments.

* * *

The year-in-review story is a classic news device to recycle coverage at the end of the year. Execute it well, and a year-in-review piece can become an excellent promotional tool, too, educating your audience about the extent of coverage that you’ve provided throughout the year.

This example from Denver’s Westword not only showcases the paper’s past work, it provides an outstanding example of effective hyperlinking. The piece tempts the reader to click links, then rewards them with good content – encourage readers to rack up the pageviews. Don’t forget this technique with your years in review coverage.

* * *

The Inigo Montoya Word of the Week: This week’s word is Randy. Sure, in the United States, that’s just some guy’s name. But in the United Kingdom? Uh, it means something else.

This week’s word stands as a reminder that when you publish online, your work can be read all over the world. Sometimes, that means readers in other countries will find meaning in your vocabulary you never intended. Here’s a story about the day when I had to wear a “Randy” nametag for my job at Walt Disney World (I’d lost my “Robert” one), and the interesting reaction it provoked from some elderly British ladies.

Check out these pages and this webpage from another successful media entrepreneur, Rick Steves, for translations of British English into American English, and vice versa.

The reality for most communities is that their neighborhoods either never received coverage from local media or that coverage has pulled back as budgets have tightened. This has left a big opportunity for hyperlocal sites to get a marketing boost like no other. I will share how that has worked tremendously well for my local site — www.sunvalleyonline.com — so that you can take these experiences and apply it into your own site. I will also share how we are being proactive with the upcoming Olympics to draw more audience. Our site has a local connection with the most prominent snowboarders on the U.S. Olympic team — Lindsey Jacobellis, Seth Wescott, Shaun White, Nate Holland and Graham Watanabe — that we are going to utilize to provide our community with a perspective they won’t get from NBC.

Curtis Bacca is a local the top snowboard/ski technician in the world with a small shop in town called The Waxroom that tunes skis and snowboards. No one has done the tech work for more gold medalists at the Olympics or X Games in the last decade. He had three athletes (Jacobellis, Holland & Wescott) competing in two events at the recently completed X Games and they came in first, first and second. He shared some pics after the event and was profiled by ESPN. He also provided his updates on the Waxroom page. Afterwards, he told me he was blown away with all people from our community and around the country who saw what he was doing and was psyched to do more at the Olympics.

At the time I’m writing this, he’s in Vancouver, well before the Olympics start, to do his reconnaissance and testing the boards to ensure the boards are riding at their maximum velocity, as every 1/1000th of a second can matter. In fact, he’s been at an “undisclosed location” that he calls the “Secret Squirrel Test Facility” and has had some mystery shots of a Boeing test facility honing the boards for the unique conditions of the misty, foggy, wet snow of the Cascades that his athletes will encounter. We’re setting him up with a helmet cam as they recon the course. After the events, he’s going heli-skiing/riding with Wescott and will share that, as well as being able to liveblog from his Blackberry while shooting pics (we have a feature that allows you to email pics/stories directly to the site), giving us the inside scoop, etc. If you know anyone who has interest in snowboarding, in particular, send them to the Waxroom page. They’ll get a perspective like none other.

Listed below are items on how we hope to turn a first-time visitor into a repeat visitor (something that would Jeff Jarvis would probably recommend to Rupert Murdoch surrounding the whole paywall kerfuffle). I should give a shout-out to Neighborlogs for providing us with a Content Management System (CMS) that enables what I outline below. In an earlier piece on OJR, I highlighted why I selected their platform over WordPress, despite having worked extensively with WordPress. The items below were brain-dead simple, which wouldn’t be the case with most CMSs I have worked with.

• Nearby Stories module. Most of our stories are geo-tagged. Chances are if someone is reading a story about a topic, they’ll be interested in stories that are about that same location.
• Featured Stories module. These are our editorial picks of the most interesting stuff on the site that we hope draw them in.
• Featured Photos module. Some people are more visual so we highlight some of the best pics that come in to the site. Hopefully some will grab their attention. Those pics, in turn, have links to the articles they are associated with.
• Events module. We highlight the upcoming events happening in the area and encourage them to post their own events.
• At the bottom of the article, we give them ways to sign-up for our email newsletter or follow us on Twitter (as well as some recent tweets).
• Finally, if none of that grabbed their attention, at the bottom of the page we have teasers for our Most Viewed Articles.

The following are some other examples of the sorts of stories that give a hyperlocal site a boost to ts visibility that we have seen work very well (some obvious, others less so):

• Natural disasters of local significance: We have had a flood and mudslides. At the time we had the flood, our community paper only updated its website once a week. Conditions were changing by the hour, so our updates, including pulling data from federal data sources, were invaluable for our community.
• Natural disasters of local and national significance: We had a major wildfire that became the number-one priority fire in the country. With people being evacuated and many local people either traveling or being second homeowners, the local newspaper and radio didn’t do them any good as those sources don’t reach beyond our community. We turned our classified system into a resource for people needing housing, places to board animals and more. Even though the local newspaper has 30 times more resources than us, we had the most comprehensive coverage because we tapped our community.

  They were shooting pictures, sharing stories, taking video and more. In part they were inspired by my limited videography skills (my only real skill is I don’t mind running up 3000-foot peaks to get a good view, as you can see here and here), knowing they could do better. Some of the video ended up getting picked up by CNN and by CBS’ 60 Minutes (see footage here). The video is from a member of SunValleyOnline’s community that happens to be a professional videographer but contributed his video to us for free though later was paid by CNN & CBS for his footage. You can see more of the footage that we posted on YouTube to see the range of video from low to high production value. By the time the fire was done, we’d had site visitors from all 50 states and 42 different countries. To this day, many of those people still visit the site as they have some connection to our area (friends, family, second homes, etc.). On an even more gratifying note, to this day people will stop me on the street and thank me for how connected they felt even though they were hundreds or thousands of miles away, as they’d been evacuated or were second homeowners.

• Locals hitting the big time in their sphere: Whether it is a Little League team going to the World Series, a local athlete going to the Olympics or someone in the arts hitting the big time, locals are deeply interested in their experience and proud of their connection with those individuals. Some subset of those people are willing to blog and share their behind-the-scenes perspective that you don’t get in a traditional media outlet. Even if it is raw, people love it.

Around the time of MSNBC.com‘s 10-year anniversary, I visited its newsroom and noticed what looked like an EKG reading (i.e., a line graph with spikes up and a plateau followed by more of the same). The only difference was each plateau on the graph was a little higher than the next as you moved left to right. As I got closer, I realized that this graph was actually MSNBC’s traffic growth over 10 years. Each of the spikes was labeled with the associated news event — OJ verdict, Princess Di’s death, elections, tsunami, 9/11 and so on. Little did I know that there would be a correlation between that graph and growing a hyperlocal site’s traffic.

Not unlike MSNBC, we have experienced the same dynamic. That is, when there’s a big story we will see a spike in traffic followed by a higher plateau of traffic. That plateau is what has the greatest value. If we did a good job when people visited for the first time by giving them a good experience, they will come back. Better yet, we get some to subscribe to our newsletter or RSS feed and are in a coveted spot to remind them of our site. Our site has gotten progressively better at increasing the length of time people spend on our site as we have added modules on the page to expose them to what else we have. Let me give a recent example. We had an unfortunate avalanche tragedy at the local ski area that defines our area. [As fate would have it, it happened at the same time we were doing a complete platform shift that I wrote about on OJR, but that's a different story.]

SunValleyOnline has not spent a penny on marketing, in the traditional sense, to build its audience. Instead it has used tactics such as what I outlined above to build itself into a top site in its area. This kind of resourcefulness is what has enabled SunValleyOnline to be one of the early profitable hyperlocal sites supporting a small team.

Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google’s news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News’ highly clicked front page.

But is inclusion in that index or other search engines’ news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I’m going to argue… no. (Well, at least it’s not worth making a fuss over.)

Why on Earth wouldn’t a news site want the higher public profile and increased traffic that inclusion in Google News could bring? Look, if your site’s goal is to appeal to a global audience, especially ones looking for news related to specific keywords and phrases, you need to be in Google News and should do everything you can to get included. If you are CNN, or the New York Times, you need to be in Google News and optimizing your pages to perform well within it.

But what if you aren’t looking to reach a global audience? What if your site’s focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers?

“Drive-by” visitors from search engines inflate your site’s traffic stats, but they don’t help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website’s health and viability.

Many newspaper executives might take some comfort in the large number of readers visiting their newsrooms’ websites. But let’s look at how engaged those visitors are with these websites.

Or, more accurately, how they are not.

An Editor & Publisher report on September 2009′s Nielsen Online report on the United States’ top 30 online newspaper websites (by most most unique visitors) showed that the mean amount of time spent for that month on one of those websites was just nine minutes and 22 seconds.

That’s a tick under 19 seconds per day on average, if you considered each website visitor the equivalent of a daily subscriber. I doubt that even the speediest reader can get through many articles – much less any advertisements – in under 19 seconds.

So, clearly, online visitors are not as valuable to today’s news websites as daily subscribers to the local newspaper were a generation ago. Diminishing engagement with their audiences, whether reflected in lower print circulation numbers or by less time spent on the website, is what’s driving legacy news businesses’ failure to hold on to their once-lucrative advertising market share. No one’s going to pay top dollar to reach an audience which isn’t there.

Start-up local news publishers must act smarter. Work to build your website by developing local community contacts, not fattening the visitor logs with out-of-market visitors driven in by search engines. Use social media to encourage current readers to invite new ones. Build content and report stories that local readers will want to recommend.

Looking over the metrics for the websites I manage, I see a clear pecking order in the amount of time spent on the site versus the way a visitor accessed the site. Here’s that list, from most time to least:

1. People referred to the site via an e-mail forwarded by a friend or colleague
2. People searching for the site’s name in a search engine
3. People accessing the site via bookmark or direct-typed URL
4. People accessing the site via a link in its e-mail newsletter
5. People accessing the site via its Facebook page or Twitter feed
6. People accessing the site via a direct link from another, non-search website
7. People accessing the site via a link on another social bookmarking site (i.e. Digg or StumbleUpon)
8. People clicking from Google News
9. People searching for a term in a search engine

For what it is worth, there’s a cliff-like drop-off in time spent between the social bookmark links and the Google News and search engine referrals. In my experience with my websites, people whose initial visit to the site is driven by a referral from a friend or colleague, or from searching for the site’s name in a search engine, spend far more time on the site and are far more likely to return than those referred by a search engine.

As an industry, we’ve got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I’ve seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages.

Okay, so traffic from search engines isn’t helping build a loyal audience for community-focused publications. But it can’t hurt, right?

Maybe it can. Forgive me while I drift into speculation here, but I’ll do this as an appeal to readers who might be more connected with the “dark arts” of Internet marketing than I am. Of the sites I’ve run over the years, the ones included in the Google News index have encountered a far, far greater incident of spam attempts in comments and other UGC features than those not included in the index.

And that’s not explained simply by site popularity, either. My two biggest family-owned websites are not in the Google News index, but OJR is. And OJR elicits exponentially more comment spam submissions than the other two sites, despite the fact that those sites receive around five to 10 times the daily traffic of OJR. (It’s gotten so bad that we now hold all comments not from site authors for approval before posting on OJR.)

If you’re ready to dismiss that observation as a single data point (and you should be), allow to me suggest that others may be experiencing the same. Speaking with other Web publishers, I’ve heard those whose sites are in the Google News index report getting hit with platform-independent comment spam at a far higher rate than those whose sites are not. (This isn’t to say that sites not in Google News don’t suffer spam attacks. The highly popular sites not in the Google News index tend to be blogs and forums running off-the-shelf publishing software, which from time to time attract spam attacks targeted specifically at those publishing systems. But those attacks are aimed at the publishing platform more than at the individual websites.) These submissions are typically human-generated, and include link spam either in the comment itself, or on the reader’s site profile page.

Are spammers targeting sites in the Google News index? I haven’t spent enough time with the black hats of the ‘net to know, despite my suspicion. Consider this my appeal to those who have to provide an answer.

In the meantime, from a system administration stand-point, I want my website to be well-known to people in its target community… and completely off the radar of spammers and search engine black hats. To me, that means:

• selecting a publishing system with an enthusiastic support community that’s aggressive about security,
• making sure that my site’s home page uses sound search engine optimization techniques to appear at the top of results pages for my site’s name and its community name,
• and spending my energy to cultivate connections within my target community, offline and on, staying clear of link swaps, black hat SEO and becoming a spammer myself.

Getting into Google News? (Or Yahoo! News or Bing’s news page?) Meh. Put that at the bottom of your priority list. As an online news publisher, you have better ways of building your readership community. Focus on those, instead.

News about health-care reform is, obviously, all over the media, including newspaper websites, 24/7, but too much of it has a Washington dateline when, in fact, the issue is basically local. People seek care where they live, not on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue NW or on K Street NW in Washington. Most of the $2.2 trillion-plus in health spending is rung up within mostly compact triangles of doctor offices, hospitals and outpatient centers in thousands of communities.

In June and July, when Congress was grappling with five reform bills at the committee level, attention had to be on what was happening in Washington. But with Congress going on summer recess, the focus is shiftingto kitchen tables and town halls all over America.

Newspapers, with their still formidable local resources, should own this story as the locus shifts to their backyards. At a time when 63 percent of Americans say the overall health care issue is “hard to understand,” newspapers could make their websites the authoritative place for people to go for the A-B-C’s – how they would be affected personally, not as part of a statistical mashup that may or may not be accurate. Newspaper sites could become not only locally tailored information centers, but also help influence how reform will be shaped when Congress returns from recess. After all, Congress is made up of lawmakers who depend on votes from people who live in thousands of communities, all of which are covered – at least in theory – by local newspaper websites. But papers aren’t planting their flag in their own territory.

Yes, newspaper sites do features about local individuals and families that can’t get care they need because they’re not insured or are under-insured, or who have gone bankrupt because of catastrophic illnesses. But these publish-and-run stories amount to scattered, quickly fading pixels that don’t let users see the whole picture.

To cover a story that has such major and pervasive effect on every household, and which will be around for months, if not years, to come, newspaper sites should have a strategically developed, attractively designed and well-promoted special section on health care – and the emphasis should be local, local and again local.

Every newspaper site, no matter how modest, could be health care central for its community. A starting point could be comparing the cost of care at local hospitals. There is a wealth of published local data that newspapers could access free. One major source is the Health Care Intensity Index, produced by the Dartmouth (University) Atlas of Health Care, which compares Medicare-related costs – 22 percent of all health-care costs – among local hospitals and against the national median.

The Dartmouth Atlas offers Excel versions of its data, which means a newspaper site editor can, with just a few minutes’ work, show how local hospitals’ costs compare with other hospitals’. Here’s a chart I quickly produced comparing a selection of hospitals in Houston – which is in the high-cost range nationally – with the low-cost Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, MN:

The obvious question is why does the Mayo Clinic – whose health-care quality is rated among the highest in the country – spend far less per patient than most hospitals in metro Houston?

Editors at any local newspaper site could do any comparison – within the metro area, statewide or nationally, all within minutes.

More spending on care, especially in the form of expensive testing and elective surgery, doesn’t produce better outcomes, data shows. It would take a bit of shoe-leather reporting, but newspapers could find out why costs vary so widely within their metro area. Instead of just being passive platforms for rants, newspaper sites could invite (or, if necessary, arm-twist), local doctors, hospitals and outpatient centers to participate in live forums where they would explain and justify the disparities and answer user questions. The sites would provide the same platform for local small businesses and labor unions, insurers whose plans cover local residents, advocacy groups and – especially important – local members of Congress. Of course, community residents – insured, under-insured and un-insured – would be able to tell their stories and ask questions about contradictory claims.

Multiply all this content generated from the more than 3,400 hospital service areas in the country, and you’d have a powerful, instructive mosaic of health care as it is delivered and priced. You’d also have, very likely, hundreds of thousands of opinions – leavened by now easily accessed, locally driven facts and figures – on how much reform Americans want.

No longer would there be a vacuum that is now filled by the demagogues and naysayers who often make things up and get away with it because there’s so much confusion about the issue.

You’d have more – much more – than another Internet “conversation.” You’d have grassroots America, with the assistance of local newspapers, helping to shape the legislation that will ultimately emerge from Congress probably by the end of the year. But newspapers have to use their still-considerable local resources to exploit the untapped potential of the Web to turn talk into action.

Newspapers’ print world will probably be a quaint media niche by the end of the next decade. What will happen to newspaper websites – will they fade into the empty quarter of cyberspace?

Yet so far they haven’t been creative enough to exploit the potential of having their stories turning up as links on the heavily-trafficked Google News homepage. In her recent testimony [PDF] at a Senate committee hearing on “The Future of Journalism,” Google Vice President for User Experience Marissa Mayer gave a virtual tutorial on how newspapers could do that.

She said:

“Publishers should not discount the simple and effective navigational elements the Web can offer. When a reader finishes an article online, it is the publication’s responsibility to answer the reader who asks, ‘What should I do next?’ Click on a related article or advertisement? Post a comment? Read earlier stories on the topic? Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users. Today, there are still many publications that don’t fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site.”

A browsing of Google News proves Mayer’s case conclusively. On May 20, the Google News homepage promoted news of California voters’ rejection of measures to close the $21 billion deficit in the state budget.

One of the links included a Los Angeles Times analysis. But the link leads to a page that gave searchers no reason to stay around and look at what else the smart and sprightly LAT website offers. With a little bit of code added to the linked page, the Times could have embedded an example or two of what has made the site so popular since ex-International Herald Tribune Web editor Meredith Artley took over as executive editor in 2007 – like this multimedia feature that was promoted from the Times homepage:

I’m sure “the return of distressed denim jeans” come-on, with a swatch of distressed denim, if it had been also promoted on the linked page would have prompted a lot of searchers to click on it, and – who knows? – maybe browse more LAT web pages. Some of those browsers would surely end up bookmarking the Times, putting them in the highly desirable category – especially for advertisers – of frequently returning visitors.

Every day, there are numerous other examples of newspapers not exploiting the links they get on Google, and thereby failing to convert the fast-clicking Web searcher into a leisurely, frequently returning browser of their sites.

To be blunt, what newspapers have to do is emulate the marketing savvy of the carnival. When you came to the freak show, you were greeted by spectacularly clothed, fast-talking barker. Standing next to the barker was the “bearded lady” or “wild man of Borneo” or some other bizarre creature – a tantalizing sampling of what was insidethe tent. Buy a ticket for 50 cents, and you could satisfy your socially incorrect curiosity.

Newspaper barkers would have an easier job than the carnival barker. They don’t have to sell tickets. But they do have to do a better job of selling their content.

For those not now following the strip, Redfern, a long-time WaPo veteran in Trudeau’s world, was laid off earlier this autumn and is now launching his own blog, a scenario not uncommon among many “real world” journalists. Fishing for tips, he chooses to launch the blog with an anecdote about Barack Obama playing basketball with U.S. troops in the Middle East.

Subsequent gags play to old lines against bloggers: their content is trivial; bigwigs don’t want to return their calls; their professional status is less than traditional media writers. Still, Redfern lands Obama on the phone; he gets his first inbound link. Ultimately, Redfern declares:

“It’s tough to leverage a byline in a media environment where anyone who can type gets a byline! I’m competing for eyeballs with millions of narcissists… almost none of whom expect to actually get paid!”

The series wraps up with a final gag about Redfern’s slacker ex-CIA son… who has his own blog.

Just as in Trudeau’s alternate universe, competition’s tougher today online than it was in print a generation ago. Redfern’s spot on – it’s tough to leverage a byline these days. But it can be done. (If Redfern supposedly was in part inspired by Bob Woodward, I am awaiting Trudeau’s version of Joshua Micah Marshall.)

The beauty of fiction is what it can tell us about our real lives. Here are three things Trudeau’s Rick Redfern did wrong in launching his blog, keeping him from better immediate success online (or, from losing his gig with the WaPo in the first place):

1) Start your blog before you leave the paper

As I’ve written before, building an economically viable audience can take months, if not years. Start the clock toward building that readership before you need it.

The real-world WaPo has taken one of the newspaper industry’s most aggressive approaches to staff blogging and chatting. If Redfern had worked at the real WaPo, he undoubtedly would have had the opportunity to start a blog long before he faced a buyout. He could have developed his blogging voice, as well as an online following, with the help of one of the newspaper industry’s top dot-com staffs.

That would have made a real Rick Redfern a far more valuable asset to the Post, perhaps helping him save his job. And even if it didn’t, he’d have a far easier time getting a base of existing online fans to follow him to a personal blog than he now faces building that base from scratch.

Reporters who don’t work for an outfit as aggressive as the WaPo ought to start blogging, too. Look at Curt Cavin’s OJR piece from last week, where wrote how he took a simple Q&A concept and built it into the most popular feature on his paper’s website.

2) Don’t change your game

If competition has made leveraging a byline online difficult, changing what that byline represents makes the task impossible. Redfern, an investigative reporter, should not have fallen into the trap stereotype that says blog entries must be short and superficial. If anything, going online allows Redfern the opportunity to write for a more engaged audience that craves greater detail.

I loved this e-mail that my wife received from a fan after she published a 5,360-word interview with violinist Rachel Barton Pine on her blog: “That RBP interview was just awesome. Isn’t it ironic that so many dead tree news sources are trying to imitate ‘Teh Internets’, and slashing article length, making them McInfoBites, and thus worthless, whilst here you do such a looooong lovely interview that would NEVER get printed in full in other print sources.”

Time spent on site has become the new fashionable metric for website success. What causes people to spend more time on a website? Longer articles.

Leave the short hoops anecdotes for Deadspin. Stay on your beat, and instead launch your blog with some solid evergreen pieces that explain, in plain, simple language, the players and issues on that beat. Take questions from readers, to discover what they want to know. Then assume, because you are now writing for a niche medium, that you can go long, in depth and intelligent and not lose any readers in the process.

Yes, your longer, in-depth pieces must offer real substance and engage your audience. But you are a professional reporter, right? If you can’t do that, you don’t deserve to beat the competition online.

3) It’s the “net” – so network

You can’t wait for inbound links to promote your blog. You must solicit them. Redfern should have gotten his son to link to his new blog, and he should be working his contacts back at the Post.

Let your fellow blogging journalists – at newspapers and independent – know when you have a scoop. Ask for links, and do not hesitate to link them when they post a fresh item. Ask other bloggers to make guest appearances on your blog, as you’d have guest “talking heads” on a TV news show. They’ll soon return the favor.

The real-world Washington Post has a voracious appetite for chat guests. Surely a real Rick Redfern could swing an invite from his former colleagues, drawing attention to his new blog in the process.

Newspaper bloggers should not hesitate to link former colleagues and competitors. If newspapers are going to sack loyal, hard-working reporters with multiple rounds of layoffs each year, journalists need to shift their loyalty from their publisher to their fellow reporters. After all, they’ll need the link help from those colleagues when they face the chop.

Obviously, you need a guerrilla marketing campaign, one that encourages people to spread the word about your site, making it a viral sensation. But how can you motivate people to do that promotional work for you?

I’ll share the secret to successful guerrilla marketing online in a moment. But first, I want to assure you that journalists can make money online by running their own websites. Reporters such as Rafat Ali and Josh Marshall have gotten plenty of notice for their successes, but I’ve also found many other publishers, through forums such WebmasterWorld, who are making a more modest, but still comfortable, living from their own websites.

Journalists looking to the Web as an option for extending their careers following a newsroom layoff won’t get by on their reporting skills alone. Quality of content, unfortunately, does not determine who makes an adequate income online. Traffic does. And you need a lot of traffic to build a commercially successful website.

How much? That’s going to depend on the topic(s) your website covers. Cover a beat that attracts big-money advertisers and you will need relatively fewer readers — maybe even just a few hundred a day. Cover a a topic that appeals to businesses selling two-buck ringtones and, well, you’ll need many, many more — hundreds of thousands, most likely.

As Geneva Overholser alluded to in her post yesterday, most journalists aren’t used to worrying about building readership. They work for a newspaper, magazine or station that employs a promotion staff and maybe a circulation department. Folks on the “other side of the Wall” handle that stuff. But when you are publishing on your own (or when your site’s promotion staff has been laid off), you need to take the initiative in building your readership.

Here’s the bad news: No one is going to promote your website for free. If you are expecting people to spread the word about your site just because it has, in your opinion, “THE MOST AMAZING WEB CONTENT EVAH,” you’ll soon join the crowd of frustrated would-be online journalists, waving their $8.37 monthly AdSense checks, moaning about how “nobody can make money online.”

Here, then, is the secret to successful guerrilla marketing online: You have to give people something in return for their effort in promoting your site.

Fortunately for your checkbook, it doesn’t have to be cash. But it does have to be real.

Paul Bradshaw this week pointed to an excellent analysis of the social bookmaking website Digg, which mentioned that successful Diggers built traffic to their websites by friending other Diggers, Digging their stories and getting reciprocal Diggs in return.

The same concept applies to Twitter, and other such services. Sure, you can post your links and updates (as OJR does), but if you really want to build traffic through these communities, you need to participate in both directions, by posting and following those who follow you. (Which, I’ll admit, OJR’s Twitter account has done a lousy job of doing. Our bad.)

Put your favorite websites in your website’s blogroll, then access them by clicking from that blogroll, so your site will show up in their referrer logs. Don’t simply use YouTube as a free video hosting service. Take advantage of its community architecture, and subscribe to others’ channels.

I’ve lamented that a generation of newspaper monopolies has robbed the industry of its competitive spirit. (Heck, that’s half my archive, it seems.) But competition online requires a strong element of cooperation, as well. You need to link to others’ sites to encourage them to link and reward them for linking to you.

Don’t go overboard. Search engines will punish your websites if they suspect that you’re engaged in massive, random link trading. Start with your offline friends and colleagues, then extend your online network to include other writers and publishers whom you respect. Then include fans and other readers of your work.

Even then, social networking only gets you part of the way there. Don’t overlook the power of the traditional media that you might have left behind. Newspaper and cable TV stories can provide one-time bursts of traffic that, if you provide enough “sticky” content and functionality on your site, can help build long-term traffic growth.

Now that you are growing into a publisher, however, don’t forget your reporting skills. Few journalists are going to bother writing about your opinion or rehash of their reporting. You need original content to elicit a news report about your work. Put yourself back in those reporters’ or producers’ place. What angle or information can you offer them that would make them want to write or broadcast a story about your site?

I’ve gotten hundreds of stories over the years about my theme park website through an annual “best of” awards that I release each year on the Fourth of July. This angle works for other news organizations because it gives them fresh content about a popular topic during a slow news period. Lots of papers and TV stations send reporters to the local amusement park on the U.S. Independence Day. My awards provide them a fresh news angle for that story, so many run with it. That’s led to an annual spike of tens of thousands of additional readers for my site over the holiday period each year. And many of those readers stick around, returning to my site multiple times over the remainder of the season.

Again, in each of these cases, you need to provide some value to a reader, a writer or a publisher for taking the time to spread the word about your work. Take the initiative. Send the press release. Link to a fellow blogger. Friend a reader on Digg or Facebook. Follow them on Twitter and YouTube.

Abandon the idea that you are talking, one-way, to an obedient readership and embrace a more reciprocal relationship. Forget about your readership and start thinking about your community.

Then, you will find your guerrilla marketing campaign already underway.