Posts Tagged ‘content’

Where Is Web Publishing Headed?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

It’s a model that works! Create an online destination for people interested in a specific topic, give them quality content to keep them coming back, and use your advertising space to promote related products with.

The same model is what works with Google AdSense, and even though some Internet Marketers like to call AdSense a “fool’s game” because you’re losing a visitor for a few cents rather than converting that visitor into larger commissions, the fact is I love AdSense and similar contextual programs because they’re designed to perform optimally on whatever page you add them to.

The reason is simple enough, no matter what your page content is about, AdSense works very hard behind the scenes to display the best performing and most relevant ads for that content–and their inventory of ads to pick from is larger than any individual could ever build for themselves.

Of course, all online advertising–even AdSense–is dependant on visitor intent. By that I mean if your visitors are purely seeking information or entertainment then you’re going to have a harder time converting them into revenue of any kind with advertising.

That’s why I believe that news sites, entertainment based communities and other similar venues where it’s obvious that the primary traffic is not in any sort of buying mode have such a hard time converting content–even great content–into earnings.

Of course, the flip side to that is if your topic is one that’s going to attract visitors who are in buying mode, or at least looking for the latest thing-a-ma-bob (like tech site visitors often are for example) then it’s a lot easier to convert your traffic into revenue.

But none of this is new or Earth shattering. In fact, it’s as old as marketing and advertising is.

A friend recently showed me a small (about 20 pages) book that he had found in the attic of an old home he is renovating. This book was printed in 1916 and is basically a “How To Do It Yourself” for building chicken coops. My friend thought it was a neat and funny find, but the first thing that caught my eye was the full page advertisement right inside the front cover, for a local Hardware store (that no longer exists by the way), and I realized right away the Hardware Store had either purchased the advertising spot, or possibly even published the book themselves, because they knew that anybody interested in building a chicken coop would need tools and hardware to do it with.

Fast forward to today and look at any well known tech gadget site or blog, then look at the advertising being displayed in relation to the story topics being covered and you’ll see that the only thing that’s changed is the medium holding the content and advertising.

So, if it works, what’s the problem?

There’s a never-ending battle between publishers and advertisers. It’s not openly discussed much, and often not even understood by folks on each side, but it exists and rages on none the less.

Because the web offers so much more opportunity than print advertising, like real-time results and tracking, better targeting and a lower bar to entry for publishers, online advertisers want to pay the least amount possible, and only want to measure their ROI’s for advertising spends by sales rather than on clicks and traffic.

Publishers on the other hand, want to earn the most they can from their content and resent the fact that advertisers have essentially eliminated the value of branding and product awareness from their ROI calculations for online advertising.

If you’ve been in sales for a while then you’ve heard about the “3 plus” rule. The average person needs to see/hear a message 3 times or more before it creates an impact. Many in sales will tell you with advertising it’s more like 5 to 7 times before you create an interest (with the consumer), and up to 11 times before you inspire action (a sale).

So, from a publisher’s perspective, what if I show you an ad for product “A” 5 times while you’re on my site reading 5 different quality stories, and then you go to the next site where maybe the stories aren’t grabbing your attention at all but you see the same ad for product “A” (for the 6th time) and that prompts you to click the ad and check it out?

The advertiser is going to reward that second site for sending the consumer their way, but wasn’t my site the one that did the heavy lifting?

This is where (and why) the “pay per click” and “pay per action” models fail publishers in a big way online.

I’ve read 3 different books on marketing through Google AdWords, and all 3 of them suggested that as an advertiser you should approach AdWords as a way to “pay for sales”, and not one of those books ever mentioned the value of brand/product awareness building through AdWords. This is a problem for both publishers and advertisers, because it leads to advertisers not realizing the potentials of online advertising methods, and of course it leads to publishers being undervalued for their work.

Traditional print and media advertising isn’t based on direct response, advertisers match product to market in picking where to display their advertisements, and then pay for volume of exposure. The value of that exposure is understood.

But online that model, which is much more fair to content producers doing the heavy lifting to generate the exposure for advertisers, hasn’t been widely embraced at all, and across most networks that do have (pay for impressions) models, the rates are typically very low.

What’s the answer?

Isn’t that the $64,000,000 question… it really comes down to a need to reinvent the wheel in online advertising. To redraw the lines of value for exposure and not just direct clicks and sales in a way that advertisers can clearly understand and calculate.

I don’t see that happening any time soon, though if it did it would probably help save some of the news organizations which are on the edge of failing. Because while it’s true that someone reading news stories isn’t in buying mode at that moment, having your ad displayed to them does still count towards those “message exposures” needed to eventually prompt interest and action, and if advertisers were paying publishers for that work then it would be easier for news and entertainment based sites to continue producing high quality content.

Until that time comes (and if it ever does), if you really want to build a business based on ad revenues then I’d suggest investing in a printing press. You’ll have a better chance at success printing a local community newsletter and selling print ad spots to your local businesses then you have online with straight advertising revenue as it exists today.

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Are There Profits In Free?

Monday, July 27th, 2009

If you’re a regular reader here then you probably realize that I’m someone who over plans everything, I like MindMaps and Action Sheets for creating blueprints for every step in a project.

In fact, by the time I’m ready to start a project I usually have it so well laid out that I could just hand everything over to a total noobie and feel confident that if they followed the blueprint it will turn out just as well as if I do it all myself.

I do all of that because I like to try and discover and head off any possible potholes in the plan before they arise.

Some call me anal retentive in my process, and it would be fair to assume that someone like me is probably pretty conservative in my business most of the time.

However, those whom I work with and who know me well also see that while I pay extra attention to details when planning out a project, my overall views on business are often a little radical, and I’m actually fond of taking risks by going against the grain.

For example, over the last year there’s been a huge trend towards using membership sites and other paid-for content models among Internet marketers.

A couple of well known marketers created products around these models and tons of other marketers bought into the hype and promises of “all you need is a continuity model”.

I’m not saying continuity sites aren’t worth building, they sure are if you can get a hungry crowd.

The point I’m making is that while the trending has been towards memberships and paid-content models, I’ve been exploring the other direction–and having some impressive (to me at least) results.

So, while lots of marketers have been building niche membership sites and paid-content training courses to sell subscriptions to, I’ve been playing with the Commercial Open Source model and finding ways to apply it to content as well as software.

The basic idea is that if you create a great product, you can give it away free, or as open source, and revenue streams will grow from customizations and support services. A great example of this is WordPress, where the core product is open source, but a lot of designers have made small fortunes on custom themes and many programmers have made good with plugins and widgets.

But, while this model works really well for great software, finding ways to apply it to content is a little harder, and frustrating at times.

The most obvious idea, which is as old as the web itself almost, is simply providing advertiser sponsored content.

That’s actually a great model, but the problem most people and businesses run into with it is two-fold.

First, your content must be paid for up-front, however your returns on the content will be slow and long-term.

For example, if I pay a freelance writer $20 for an article and post it to my site that earns strictly through Google AdSense, then I’m out $20 today and it may take 6 months or longer for that article to accumulate $20 worth of advertising clicks.

Of course, the up-side to that is once you break even, every penny that article earns from then on is pure profit.

In talking about a single article this doesn’t seem like a major obstacle, but for a full-blown content site where you’ll need to publish multiple articles every day the up-front costs for content can add up quickly, yet the returns will remain slow and long-term.

That’s partly why some print publications have had trouble moving online profitably, they’re used to paying for an issue’s content, printing the issue, collecting the cover sales and ad checks and moving onto the next issue. Everything is contained in these short-time windows around each printed issue.

But online where content can last forever, the view can’t be “this month’s revenue must cover this month’s costs”. Because this month’s content can (and should) continue earning revenue for you month after month going forward, so the production costs have to accounted for in that long term revenue stream too.

And that leads into the second major problem many run into, and that’s creating content that is evergreen. This is what trips up most news publishers, as well as many entertainment, gossip, political and other fluid themed sites.

If your site is centered on content that’s going to be “old news” or outdated quickly, then that’s going to cut into your long term revenue capabilities from your content.

However, content that’s evergreen has a longer (or infinite) shelf-life and can continue earning you money for years. An example of this is a small utility program I made about 10 years ago that was just a simple Color Picker for webmasters, it still gets 20+ downloads every day, ten years later, and I still get a few clicks (revenue) from the ads on the download page each week.

That tiny little script that took me about 30 minutes to create 10 years ago has probably earned me several thousand dollars now. That’s the power of evergreen content.

So, I’ve gone a little off-track here, but the point is advertising sponsored content can be a profitable model, and if you’re smart about your content it can continue bringing you revenue for a very long time.

Another smart way to convert free content into revenue is by simply repurposing your free content.

Giving it away free on your site pages (with advertising) is great, but does it meet the needs of every member of your target market?

Do any of them have iPods? Then converting some of your content into podcasts is a great way of repurposing it, and if you build a listening audience up then you can sell in-broadcast advertising with it. Just like you sell in-mailing ads with your weekly/monthly newsletter.

You are sending out newsletters from your site(s), right? If not, there’s another opportunity to repurpose content and deliver it straight to your market’s Inboxes, with their permission of course, and with direct ad sales inside each mailing.

How about videos? With almost no real creative talent at all, you can take the audio of your podcast and mix in some screen shots or stock images to create a neat slideshow video presentation from your existing content.

Publish collections of your content as free eBooks. You can do it as PDF’s, or better yet, turn your content into Windows executables (there’s tons of HTML to EXE converters out there for free), that way you can list the content software in some new places to attract new visitors. — Best is to create both PDF’s and EXE’s from your content to give your visitors every possible option. And again, your eBooks can contain advertising.

The bottom line is if you’re serious about earning revenue by giving your content or products away for free, there are ways to do it. You just have to get your mindset in the right place, and understand that whatever the upfront cost of publishing your content is, the revenue is going to be slow and long-term from each piece–but if you’re creating evergreen content it should work out to be profitable over time.

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Do You Trust Your Content?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

This morning I attended a neighborhood meeting and ran into a fellow blogger who was there. He focuses on blogging about our city, or what some call “hyper local blogging”, and in the past we’ve had some great discussions about our city and region both offline, and in his blog comments.

However, we haven’t interacted in quite a few months and he asked me why he hadn’t seen me in the comments of his blog lately. It was a bit awkward for me, but I decided to just be honest with him. So, I explained that while I always enjoyed his blog and our discussions, I had to remove his blog feed from my reader a few months back when he switched from publishing full stories to just summaries through RSS.

Like most people, I have a ton of constraints on my time, and with over 350 blogs that I try to keep up with between news, friends, politics and the various industries that I’m involved in–I just don’t have time to click-thru for every full story.

360 Google Reader Subscriptions as of July 20, 2009

360 Google Reader Subscriptions as of July 20, 2009

I also do a lot of my feed browsing/reading on mobile devices through the day, and having to click-thru to each blog that publishes just summary feeds is a pain in the backside on a hand-held.

So, I simply don’t subscribe (or keep subscriptions) to sites that only publish summary feeds.

He was put off by my position, and countered with “what about all the good stuff you’re going to miss out on?”

I’ve heard this all before, in-fact a very popular Tech blogger made the same argument to me last year at a Christmas party, but I’ve thought about this on my own and the conclusion I came to was this: if it’s that important I’ll hear about it on one of the other related blogs that I am following (because they publish full story feeds), and if it’s not that important than I’ll never miss what I didn’t know existed.

You see, my position is simple, as a blog reader I’m an information consumer and it’s not up to me to seek your product out. You, as the product producer, need to understand my needs and make your product fit them.

I understand that everybody wants page views, and revenue is traffic driven online, but here’s the deal. If I subscribe to your feed and you publish something that grabs my attention, I will click-thru from the full story to see if there are any comments posted at your blog, because the comments often hold better stuff than the actual stories do.

Or, if your posting prompts me to want to add something, I’ll click-thru just to post a comment of my own on your blog.

In other words, if you create a quality product, I will still come to your site and interact with you. All I ask is that you make your product available for me on my terms in the first place so that I can decide if it’s “quality” or not before hand. Don’t ask me to waste my time clicking-thru on every posting you publish in order to make that determination by offering a summary feed. If you do, you will lose me for not respecting the value of my time.

A quality blog will not suffer from publishing a full story feed, on the contrary I believe it will grow because of it.

The only questions is, do you trust your content to attract click-thrus and interaction or not? Well, do you punk? (Sorry, just watched Dirty Harry again over the weekend and couldn’t resist)

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Stop, Thief! We Can Do Business

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Content theft happens a lot online. Often it happens without the thieves even realizing that they’re doing anything wrong. There’s a lot of debates over why this is so, with ideas from poor schooling to poor parenting and something labeled “digital disrespect” being tossed around.

Whatever the root cause (or causes) are, the bottom line is that more and more people seem to either feel it’s okay to violate copyrights, or just don’t understand that they are violating copyrights with using and sharing other’s property online.

Now, I’m not going to get into the full debate here, but I did want to comment on the portion of it that affects site or online business owners who suddenly find their content or materials being used somewhere else.

When this happens, and depending on just what content is being used there are basically two ways to approach it.

NOTE: I’m referring to text and graphic content here, not software or other advanced mediums

First, you can contact the thief with a Cease and Desist letter and hope they comply. And if they don’t you can then contact their web host provider and so on up the chain in the hopes that someone along the way will eventually pull down the stolen content.

This is the most obvious and used option available, and most of the time it will be effective for you in terms of getting your content off the offending site(s). However, you’re not going to see any compensation beyond that by doing this unless you go the full length of taking the thief to court… and of course you win the case.

And even then unlike on TV Court shows, just winning a judgment doesn’t mean you’ll ever actually see any money from the thief because financial judgments are often impossible to collect on for the average person.

The second option will require some more thought, but it may just prove more lucrative for you in the long run than having your content pulled down would be.

Recently I heard of a graphic artist who discovered a major clothing company was using one of his designs, but they hadn’t commissioned the use through him.

So he sent them a non-threatening letter basically saying “hey, it’s pretty cool to see my design on your stuff but shouldn’t I have been asked first?”

It turned out the company had purchased the design from another artist, but they conceded without question that artist must have ripped-off of his original design.

The company quickly offered to stop using the design, or if he preferred they’d continue using it and pay him a percentage off of all sales.

He agreed to the continued use and then a really unexpected thing happened. Obviously the company was impressed with his artistic talents since they were already using his design, so after finding him to be “easy to work with” since he hadn’t approached them in anger or with threats of legal actions, the company offered to commission more designs from him.

That story got me to thinking, if someone steals your site content it may be worth looking at how they’re using it, how popular their use of it is, and determine if there isn’t some way you might leverage their theft for your own benefit that would be better than just having them pull it down.

If you can come up with a plan to get valuable backlinks, free publicity or in some way carve off some of the traffic or revenue they’ve generated with your content then it might be in your best interest to approach them in a non-threatening manner and suggest your plan as an alternative to requesting they take down the content.

Again, every situation is going to be unique and depend on a lot of things, but it’s certainly worth considering at least if someone steals your content and then has something (links, traffic or revenue) to offer from it rather than just demanding they remove it from their site(s).


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Want tons of content pages fast and in an ethical manner?

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

writing

For a long time people have been using other’s writings for content. I’m not talking about theft here, but rather the republishing of RSS content, articles from directories that have reprint rights attached and the likes. However, as search engines have become more aggressive in not giving weight (love) to sites using this type of content via what are referred to as duplicate content filters it has grown increasingly harder for webmasters to fill their site pages.

I’m not really going to touch on the moral or ethical questions over duplicate content too much. I tend to agree with the search engine positions for the most part, that republishing content just for the sake of “fluffing” up your web site page totals ultimately isn’t good for the end users and shouldn’t be rewarded in the SERPs.

That said, there are times and places where republishing other’s writings is absolutely ethical and warranted–and if done correctly shouldn’t cost the republishing site(s) any loss of favor among search engines.

Here’s one example. Lets say you have a site about Dye-Sublimation Heat Transfer Printing and you want to create a content page on a specific new model of Heat Press machines but haven’t actually used that model yourself, what can you do? Well, you could find what others have written and then just rewrite their opinions. That would give you original content in the search engine eyes, however it isn’t really original since you’ve just rewritten other’s works and it isn’t very ethical to do that.

Another option would be to pay someone to write the content for you. Again this leads to original content for you and is (if you hire the right person) going to be purely original and not a copy of other’s work. But, it can be costly to do if you want to build a lot of pages.

Or another option–and this is where an ethical use of republishing comes in–would be to collect 2 or more articles on the Heat Press model that have already been written by others and are available with reprint rights, place them all on your content page and then write an original and thorough summary introduction which clearly states that the following information has been collected (with permissions) from various sources in order to offer the reader a broad range of details and opinions on this new Heat Press model.

Make sure that your summary encompasses and explains what the reader will find in each individual article that follows, and what your thoughts on each article are. The goal isn’t to review each article you’re republishing further down the page, but to just summarize each one separately so that the reader can decide which one (or all) they think will best serve them to read.

In doing this you achieve several positive things with your page for yourself, the search engine bots and most importantly for your readers: The summary introduction is going to be at-least several paragraphs of original content at the beginning of the page, and that makes those search engine bots smile. By making the bots happy your pages will be more likely to get indexed and rank among the search engines (and not be ignored for the use of duplicate content), and you’ll not only be giving your readers relevant information on the topic, but choices of sources for the information that are well summarized to allow them to quickly get what they want or need from your page.

I know there are some who take a hard-line approach that any republishing of content is bad. I disagree with that to the extent that I think having 100 people all writing the same information–even in their own unique ways and writing voices–is equally congestive, not to mention the wasted time and energy of all those people testing and writing about the same thing. So, in my opinion when several sources already exist and can be used in a manner that doesn’t just collect and regurgitate, but actually adds something of value for the reader in presentation–as the summary introduction I’ve described does–I believe it is an ethical and correct application of reprint rights.

Still, if you’re absolutely against (or afraid of) republishing article content, this same method can still be used with a slight twist to build your site content pages. Simply find several articles on the subject that already exist, write extensive summary reviews of each article and instead of having the actual articles republished on your page, link to them as the original sources. Basically, you’re reviewing the individual articles for your readers and offering them the opportunity to read the original materials if they want. An important thing to remember is that in doing this you must write an actual review of each article and not just copy-n-paste from it and call that your summary. That’s unethical and will still be considered duplicate content, however an honest review in your own words of the author’s piece that includes a link to the original article is perfectly acceptable.


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