“Building a Digital Audience for News”
Posted in "Journalism Next" Chapter Blogs with tags "Journalism Next", Building a Digital Audience for News, Mark Briggs, Meridith Kaufman, online journalism, onmason on March 4, 2010 by MeridithJournalism Next by Mark Briggs Chapter 11
The internet is a whole different animal than print. The internet is full of things to pull the audience away. So how do you get them in, in the first place?
Well you track the progress of your site and see which and what is getting the most traffic. This can be done through programs that count the page clicks. But most sports stories or celebrity stories are going to leave every other story in the dust. That doesn’t mean editors are going to make everyone do sports or celebrities. It does mean though that editors are going to learn from how those stories grow to make your stories grow.
If you get a small percentage of the daily user community coming to your story online then great! Track it!
“Developing a culture to track and measure your work product is essential to competing in this data-driven world,” explains author Mark Briggs”…So, producing that product on a regular schedule is vital to a functioning business.”
Once you’ve identified the key things you need to track then you can track them with software called web analytics. This complies a database for you of click views on each page, if that is what you want.
After you’ve complied the data and see what you need to work then work on packaging your story to how the audience wants it. I’m not saying change it completely, just cater the headline so search engines can pick it up.
Then you can grow your audience through a multitude of things:
1. Content is king
2. Linking is queen
3. Title tags
4. HTML tags
5. video
6. and a little ‘tude.
Always be promoting your self.
” the top three priorities of Web publishing are distribution, distribution, distribution.”
If you link your articles to your Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ect. more people will have access it and more people will read it. Send it out. Let people know. Social media is now a marketing tool that can be used to promote and as a news medium as well.
