suggestion we think every publisher should consider, it's to hire or work with a ... Depending on the way it is implemen
Published by: Accretive Partnerships, Inc. 3600 Dallas Highway SW, Suite 230-242 Marietta, GA 30064 | (678) 954-6552 www.accretivepartnerships.com
[email protected] @mktpartnerships
Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
The landscape for online publishers is highly competitive. Of the tens of millions of active subdomains on the Internet, just over 19,000 generate more than 500,000 pageviews per month (PVs) in the U.S. according to Nielsen/NetRatings. They represent almost 75% of all the content consumed each month. The remaining subdomains represent what is often referred to as the “long tail”. To compete and win in this space, online publishers need to embrace the following 7 “Secrets”. #1: Websites must be responsive.
Desktop internet and social network usage growth have plateaued in the United States. Digital’s momentum has moved to mobile. What this means for you as a publisher and marketer is that your web site needs to be responsive. It needs to seamlessly display an optimized user interface across all browsers, all screen sizes, all operating systems, and all device types so that users can interact with all site features, navigation, and content with ease. This includes advertising. Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
#2: Content is king, but only if it’s engaging.
All content publishers have been told that content is king. Many publishers take that to mean they must deliver the highest quality content to be successful. This is especially true if the content team is led by a classically trained journalist or a specialist in a scientific or medical field. Practical experience has taught us that this is not necessarily the case. What drives readership generally falls into one of 7 categories: • Cultural taboos (think Miley Cyrus and her twerking during a prime time event); • The unusual (think the “fail” videos that pop up across the Internet daily); • The outrageous (think Lady Gaga and her costumes); • Humorous (think Jon Stewart and the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert and the Colbert Report); • Remarkable (think Susan Boyle singing on Britain's Got Talent); • Secretive (think of the release of the Abu Ghraib prisoner photos); and • “Cute” (think all those pervasive kitten photos and videos). Now don’t get us wrong, content needs to be engaging but you don’t need to spend a fortune to develop it. User generated content is often more valuable than professionally written content. Too often we have worked with publishers who have spent hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on content that might have been great for publication in a peer reviewed medical journal but couldn’t interest an average reader. Great photos, compelling video, and catchy headlines, that’s what gets users attention. If there is one suggestion we think every publisher should consider, it’s to hire or work with a great copy writer and to implement multi-variant testing on images and headlines. Continual optimization is the key to extracting the most value from your content.
Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
#3: Have a marketing strategy to build brand awareness and your audience.
You need to have an integrated digital marketing strategy in order to bring awareness to your site and to your content. First and foremost you need to ensure that your web site is optimized for search. According to Giselle Abramovich at cmo.com, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Search is the No. 1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300 percent. Advanced Web Ranking released a study taken from Google Webmaster Tools in July 2014. The study showed that on average, a click was generated to a result that appeared on page 1 of the organic search results 71% of the time. A position on page two or three by comparison garnered a clickthrough rate of less than 6%. Further analysis showed that placement in the top 5 results on page 1 account for over 95% of all clicks. The take-a-way here is that SEO matters. Your goal should be to garner a top 5 placement on the keywords that will drive your business. You may also want to buy these keywords to enhance your brand exposure and increase the opportunity to garner a click. If you want to expose your brand and content to a mass market audience in the United States on desktop, leverage content discovery/content promotions networks like Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, and Disqus. If you are unfamiliar with content promotion networks, they are payper-click networks that typically promote both publisher content in the form of articles, slideshows and the like along with sponsored advertising content from direct response advertisers. These sponsored posts typically occur at the end of an article on a publisher’s site. Their goal is to help the publisher that is providing the screen real estate monetize the exit from their site.
Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
Another strategy is to engage in the development of strategic partnerships such as the one recently announced by Twitter with Google. The goal is to leverage the broad reach of the strategic partner to grow your own audience. This is most often achieved through a content syndication relationship. This is a process whereby licensed content from one party is presented on another party’s website or within an application. In this way, the content licensor gets brand exposure to a new audience and the content licensee gets access to incremental content of interest to their users. There may be a licensing fee or a distribution fee associated with the content. In the case of Google and Twitter, Google is paying Twitter to include tweets in Google’s search results. Cross Promotion, a form of marketing promotion where customers of one site are introduced to the benefits of another site, is another tactic that can be leveraged under the heading of strategic partnerships. This cross promotion can be achieved through banners, emails, and the like. It is a form of brand extension. Cross Linking is another tactic that can be employed. Cross linking normally takes the form of an exchange of branded links as a means to offer the user more options and enhance their experience. Depending on the way it is implemented it may penalize your SEO activities so involve your SEO specialist in this discussion prior to going down this path with a partner. Social media outreach is a growing form of brand promotion. You should certainly establish social media pages on venues where your potential users congregate be that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, etc. You don’t need to be everywhere but wherever you are, stay engaged. A bad social media page is worse than no social media page at all. We are a big proponent of leveraging Facebook groups. This allows your brand to engage with brand suspects where they are naturally congregating and allows you to transition these suspects into prospects and eventually audience members through meaningful posts with link backs to your site. We have found that these posts can materially impact your audience size in a positive way.
Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
#4: Implement analytics and track everything you can!
Understanding your users, segmenting your users, and providing solutions for each user group can help you stand out among your competition and accelerate the growth of your site and your business. It is a good idea to leverage A/B or multi-variant testing to determine what your customers want. Why guess when their actions will clearly indicate their preferences? Use industry standard UTM codes appended to links for all your partnerships, as well as, on all your social media outreach campaigns. You will be able to monitor the performance of each channel and assign resources accordingly. #5: Maximize user engagement to maximize revenue.
If you are an information publisher with an ad supported site, increasing your user’s session depth will increase your ad revenue. This can be achieved in a number of ways. First and foremost, break your content down into bite size chunks. We generally recommend chunking content into sections of 500 words or less for the web and 250-300 words for an audience that is primarily accessing your site via a mobile device. This has the effect of “manufacturing” pageviews by forcing users to click to the next page or section. For usability, you should offer your users the option to view the complete article with a toggle selection but the default presentation should be in chunks.
Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
Make sure you implement a website recirculation strategy also known as related article links. Treat every page like it is a home page because in today’s search heavy world, it often is. This should increase your pageviews by over 10%. Leverage slideshows. Most people are visual and will consume large quantities of photos. You can also use photos and captions to tell the story. This will significantly increase your pageviews and associated ad revenue if every other image or every 3rd image requires a page refresh. Make sure to optimize your images because minimizing page load times is of utmost importance.
Optimize your clickstream. Promote content within your high volume articles that will drive traffic into lower volume, high value sections. This will help alleviate the need for make-goods while it maximizes your revenue potential. #6: Drive frequency and repeat visitors.
If you are not doing it now, implement website registration and an e-mail newsletter right away. People are busy and do not use destination sites like they used to. You need to remind them of your value to get them to come back. At the very least you should send a weekly recap newsletter highlighting the 7 most popular articles from the past week. This will let your active users self-select the content on the site that is most appealing and your newsletter should put this in front of users who have not returned to the site in the past week. You should also consider leveraging e-mail retargeting or automated e-mail triggering as a means to expose your user base to content they may not have read but that may be appealing to them based on the previous content that they visited when on your site. Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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7 SECRETS EVERY ONLINE PUBLISHER NEEDS TO KNOW TO GROW THEIR ONLINE AUDIENCE AND TOPLINE REVENUE
#7: Maximize your RPM.
Many ad supported publishers utilize CPM-based display ads as their sole revenue source leveraging a direct sales force, Google AdSense, and/or a programmatic ad exchange. These CPM ads generate revenue based on impressions served but also contain frequency caps and other targeting parameters that might limit the revenue produced. To maximize revenue, publishers should diversify their page mix to include CPC and CPA offerings such as sponsored listings, content recommendation widgets, and affiliate offers which are monetized by user actions like the click or purchase. Publishers should also switch up which ads display in their ad positions based on the depth of the user session. Publishers may also want to implement a soft paywall on certain sections of their site in advance of users getting access to high value content. A soft paywall is an exchange of value other than a credit card in order to access the content. It might be registration data with an e-mail address, it might be a completed download, or it might require watching a high value video for at least 8 seconds before being allowed access to the desired content. Publishers should use this mechanism to supplement their content value. In conclusion, while the online publishing environment is challenging, you can certainly be successful in growing your online audience and topline revenue. Be creative; Take intelligent risks; Constantly test, measure, and learn; Adapt when new information becomes available; Partner, because no one can go it alone in today’s market; and Seek out help when you need it.
Copyright © 2015 Accretive Partnerships, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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