Lessons in self-promotion for independent news publishers

When you step up from newsroom grunt to becoming a website editor and/or publisher, don’t forget that you’re also making the switch from reporter to source.

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.

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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.

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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.

How the Vancouver Winter Olympics (and other big stories) can help a hyperlocal news website grow

Hyperlocal sites, by definition, are focused on their local community. However, periodically something happens in your community that has national significance that can draw some broader attention. More important is how it can accelerate your reach within your community by exposing your site to a new set of local people. This latter form of traffic is the most sustainable.

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.

Does your site really need to be in Google News?

With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy‘s family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.

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.