Newspapers – what could they do differently?

After reading this brilliant rant against the established media, mainly News Limited’s criticism of Google, I eventually arrived at the ‘yeah but’ question.

Newspapers have repeatedly struggled with the internet due to a lack of understanding on its mechanics and the power of the internet to substitute them.

They’ve attempted different business models and all the while alienating users due to their constant change.

One such attempt was content subscriptions. Two examples were Reuters and Fairfax. Reuters won because they learned the key is distribution to enhance someone else’s website. Fairfax failed because they thought they were the centre of the universe and tried to make the reader pay. Unfortunately as a business model most choose to follow the Fairfax and most of these attempts have now disappeared.

But it hasn’t been all bad either. Newspapers do get a lot of traffic, their websites do make money from advertising. This in itself is a great platform to begin truly exploring their potential on web.

So what do they have as assets?

1. Content creation
2. Established advertising sales capability
3. A brand that signifies the quality, subject and/or politics of the content
4. Existing real estate to launch
5. Existing ad trafficking technology

If you had just one of these assets you’d be on to a winner. So four has to be a winning formula. So here are some things that Newspapers could do quickly, that enhances the web and changes the business model.

Enhance my ecom website

Like Reuters on our share trading website, why don’t newspapers explore how they might enhance ecommerce websites. Book reviews, product reviews, movie guides, news and other content all make for better ecommerce websites. It is expensive to do yourself if you aren’t in the business of doing it. Distribution should not be precious, just add a self service content shop to your own website they every web owner can subscribe to.

Sell advertising for others

APN in New Zealand run advertising networks for other websites. They take too big a cut for my liking but it is the right step in leveraging the trafficking technoogy and sales force reach.

Crowd journalism

If you want to become part of the web, stop editing and open your pages to people to become the commentators and journalists. The reason blogs and aggregators are killing you is that they do not moderate to an agenda or stop real contribution.

Having a comments page at the bottom is not contribution, it’s a sop. Allow people to add their voice to the article and even develop the story for you. Readers are more likely to read your news and follow a story as it is develops. It could be so simple by letting users tweet the story on the page.

Don’t stop aggregation, embrace it

Stop pretending you own the news and start understanding you only have ownership of the paper or web page you print it on. If you change your perspective you will put your efforts where they should be – in distribution. The wider your distribution, the more ways you will find to make money from it.

An example of this is affiliate networks. I have a widget that I sell on my site. I also let others sell my widget on there website for a cut of the revenue. You could apply this to news by opening up your content for others to make money from with their own news site. Properly delivered you could get a fee per impression of their advertising revenue. It works where your brand lends credibility to the affiliates website.

Don’t create content, use someone else’s

Editorial teams now have a great choice of picking up quality stories from blogs and aggregators. Now you just have to sell the adverts.

Think cable

Recognise that you have the possibility of scale unimagined. Stop writing stories for your own mass market publication and write for syndication and delivery on a global scale to particular market niches.  The same as cable TV.

Get into the new portals

Why can’t I see my news on Facebook?

Change the mindset

All up, these are not big leaps but they do require a change of mindset from a market for ‘the paper’ to a market of ‘me’.

SEO minimum requirements

Search engine optimization (SEO) services are not for every business. Paying a website optimization company a retainer to talk to search engines may not be the best next move.

If your business website is a billboard of what the business does, who does it with a light sprinkling of how it’s done you’re probably not too into the web anyway.  That website? It’s a virtual business card and chances are you’ve discovered there are better leads in more traditional channels.

In this case spending money on SEO services to investigate, recommend, build and manage a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is a waste of time and money. You simply won’t get a clear ROI for the effort. But that doesn’t mean SEO should be ignored. Your customers and your prospects should still be able to find you when they put your name or your trade into Google.

You should still seek to index well on your business name and the main few  search terms that most apply to your business. Your website and content should be applicable enough to generate voluntary linking and natural relevance to your industry. So you just need the basics. The basics let search engine robots crawl and understand your pages.

Here are 5 SEO techniques that meet the basics of SEO, those minimum requirements to optimizing your website. You can achieve this in a couple of hours and it should help you shoot past 99% of your competitors.

Actually, let’s face it. This is everything that many SEO services offer anyway. They just dress it up with documentation and jargon.

1. SEO Words

The first thing you need to know is what people are searching in relation to your business. You can find this out with the Google Keyword tool.

If my business is an SEO service I’d pick the most popular term, in this case “SEO” and then the next 6-9 most popular terms that are synonyms. The next most popular terms in this case are “seo optimization”, “search engines”, “search engine optimisation”, “search optimization”, “seo search”, “website optimization”.

2. The Title

See that thing on the blue bar of the browser that says “SEO minimum requirements”. That is the Title.

The Title is a meta tag in your page code that the browser reads when it hits the page. Between 6 and 10 pages on your website (if you’ve got 10 or more) should have a Title that clearly reflects the subject and content of that page, followed by your business name.

The code that makes it show up in the blue bar looks like this <title>SEO minimum requirements &laquo; Emissive</title>. The &laquo; is the reverse chevrons, you don’t need it, so leave it out.

Write some code like this in word or notepad for between 6 and 10 of your pages. If you can, try and cover most of those popular keywords identified in your keyword search. But only use them if they are relevant to your content.

IMPORTANT: don’t change your content too much to meet the keywords. Humans buy your goods, not search engine robots.

3. Page Title

As in the actual title of your page. This should be exactly the same as the subject described in the Title. In this case “SEO minimum requirements”.

Again, make sure it lines up with your page subject and content.

4. Meta Keywords

Keywords are like Titles. They exist in the pages code but in this case you don’t see them. Only the search engine robot.

Those search terms we looked up at the start and didn’t use? This is where you put them. Take the top terms, ensure they’re synonyms and chuck them in the code.

The keyword code looks like this <meta content=“Emissive, seo, seo optimization, search engines, search engine optimisation, search optimization, seo search, website optimization ” name=“Keywords”> which again you do for the pages you have chosen to optimize.

Do this for each page you are optimizing.

5. Meta Description

I’ve never met a description on a web page because again, it exists in the code but not on the page. The prerequisite for this highly technical code is being able to write a sentence and enclose it within some code.

It will look something like this <meta content=“The minimum requirements for search engine optimisation from Emissive.” name=“Description”> ensuring it actually meant something.

Do this for each page.

What’s next

Give your SEO work to your web developer and ask for it to be loaded into the chosen pages at the next release of the website. Or buy your web develop lunch and get it done that day. It should take them 30 minutes to do 6 pages at the most including testing.

After that SEO happens by itself

Let it happen. What most SEO services don’t tell you is that the search engines take over from here. If the robot crawls the page and the calculation of the search engine agrees, then you will rank well on the search engine.

If the page isn’t crawled and or the search engine does not agree then it won’t. This has more to do with the subject and content of the page than anything most SEO services can provide you. A reason for it not to crawl is that you have not told the search engine you exist. Submit your website here.

Some of your pages will optimize really well. Some won’t. However, what will happen is that you will rank very well on your business name. And your digital business card will be miles ahead of where you were at no cost, for little time.