Remember, if you are interested in internet advertising sales, there is a separate classroom just for sales managers...

Questions to tutors:
http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/digitalmediasalesacademy/2012/09/digital_media_sales_classroom.php#comments

Media Sales Academy activities:
http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/digitalmediasalesacademy

Hi Danny,

Interested in Online Sales Training possibilities for some of our sales staff. Can you tell me what you guys have planned in the UK/Europe or of course, the sweltering metropolis of Dubai?

Thanks,
Giselle

create a presentation with the key learnings from the course to "spread the word"

The fact is that mobile internet will be massive in the next 6 month. Keep an eye on other mobile devices with similar screens and user experience like the iPhone coming soon.

Three key factors that will make the mobile web work:
- full webbrowser on your phone
- flat data plan from mobile operators
- great user experience

Add to that website layouts designed specifically for the mobile screen!
think: www.mindtheapp.com/tubes OR mobile.nytimes.com or www.citytools.net/ambientnews/iphone OR iphone.facebook.com

more will follow.

I will investigate our websites and try to change the appearance and functionalities with the end-user in mind.

So building a plan to work more user-centric in deciding what content and services we will deploy.

I've learnt a lot over the past couple of days including tactics to increase online advertising revenues. My first project is going to be looking at some traffic building options, starting with the possibility of online user-generated classifieds.

Question: online revenue

However, my boss believes in the long tail for content disctribution.

Argument pro / con my boss?

How to reach larger audience for my website by building communities?

Ways print publishers get more video quickly and cheaply onto their sites.

1. Ask our users: User generated content can help bring in more content, and granular personal content that tells stories from their own lives and their own local areas. But be cautious about where, when and how – separate out the social content from hard news.
2. Buy it: Work with press agencies to buy in regular feeds of content.
3. Create it: Invite some of our journalists to start shooting basic video when reporting from the field.
4. Find a specialist: look for one video journalist who can produce a sustainable feed of quality material.
5. Set up a studio: Build simple soft studio inside your news room, using it for comments and interviews with your own editors and writers.
6. YouTube: The good, the bad and the ugly are all on You Tube. Maybe there’s something for you?

Ten answers to…Why click through doesn’t matter?

It’s about eyeballs, not clicks.
Brand awareness is usually built without click through.
Have you ever clicked on a TV commercial?
When the content’s this good, people may take in the message but not want to leave our site.
Think about where you want the customer to go, why and how you communicate it through the banner.
Brand awareness advertising reaches out to people who are not actively looking for you at that moment. That’s how firms build front of mind awareness.
Many campaigns don’t need a click; they can communicate the message within the banner.
If you’re looking for clicks then you need a direct response mechanic; some banners, with some calls to actions, on some pages will be just right for this.
And if there’s a low click through, then you can be sure it’s exactly the right people.
People often visit advertised websites soon after seeing a banner, but without clicking. You can track this using ‘post impression’ analysis.

This is a place where participants on Digital Publishing Strategy Academy courses can post their questions and comments.

What matters most to you in digital publishing?
What issues is your business exploring right now?
What are your main takeouts from training?

Online moderation – Deciding when to moderate comments in social media

Having a policy and process in place for moderation is key to maintaining strong online discussion and removing risk for you as a web publisher. But the practice is difficult because it raises the deepest of questions about the relationship between publisher and participant. How do you deal with conversations between viewers that descend into a flame war? How do you maintain a thread of comments that are on topic? How do you build credibility in the debates on your site without censoring everything that's written? How do you avoid the legal risk of libel when you are the publisher but your readers are the author? Social media tools are great ways to engage audiences and boost page traffic, but moderation needs to be taken into account from the very start.

http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/03/best_practice_online_moderatio.php

Should I moderate the discussion in the new social media and forum spaces we are creating?

Audience acquisition and audience retention strategies are two parts of the triangle of creating high sustainable audiences. A key areas is in making more from the audiences already on the site. The effective cross selling between different parts of the website can trigger a step-change in the audience numbers and the level of engagement. When publishers appreciate the direct relationship between the number of pages viewed and the number of advertising exposures, it’s clear that there is a strong need to creating more opportunities to click deeper, encouraging audiences to click between different areas of the site and to consume more pages. Here are some simple tips for making the most of what you have:

1. Navigational language
Think about whether your navigation is written through the eyes of a publisher or those of a viewer. Look for language that fits with the customer’s and the way they describe products and services. A simple example of this is the word ‘classifieds’ to describe the small-ads listings in newspapers and magazines. It’s so deeply embedded in the industry jargon that we don’t even see it, and yet customers are far more likely to be looking for ‘flights’, ‘cars’, ‘homes’ or ‘jobs’, so by switching the language around to match their needs it makes content more discoverable and creates greater opportunities for clicks.

2. Navigation structures
Apply the same process to the structure of the site itself. The example of ‘classifieds’ works well here too: why put all the content from such diverse areas into one section? Link the motoring adverts and listings from the motoring content pages and put property advertising in a dedicated property section. Many media groups have gone as far as creating dedicated sites for each of the classified ‘pillars’, but the model of having content cluster together around a clear human need state is a proven way to help web publishers get more from their online resources.

3. Cross promote in smart places
There’s often a natural relationship between the audiences in one part of a website and those in another. For example, publishers reading Digital’s articles about web publishing strategy might also be interested in Digital Media Sales, so that would be a logical place for this publisher to anchor some cross promotional activity. By learning about your audiences and the patterns and connections they share, publishers are best placed to get their cross promotion working much harder.

4. Cross linking with editorial
Hyperlinking within the text of an article is at the heart of online journalism. Back in the mid 90s when I helped run The Daily Telegraph’s internet businesses in the UK, we had a team of sub editors manually coding those sort of links every night. It was an arduous process, but the value to the readers was immense, and built on the very heart of the hyperlinking discipline that predated the development of the web. This approach has a powerful way of boosting traffic because it presents the most relevant content just at the right moment to the right person.

One approach is still to do this manually. It’s a major challenge for many publishers, but requires no system development, and if the editorial team and content is small it can prove cost effective. Another hinges on categorising the stories with attributes (tags) that describe what they are about. Popularised by the blogging platforms, the latest generations of content management tools have tags at their heart and when used well these massively amplify the number of related links. But the web continues to evolve and the new generation of smart contextual search tools, such as British technology firm Grapeshot, are opening up even better ways to achieve this. They can figure out the relationships between different documents on the website and automatically connect relevant content together.

5. Getting internal search right
It’s still staggering that many websites seem to forget to put search tools into their navigation. By making content across the site searchable and the services quickly discoverable by people already on the site, the potential for a reader to move from one section to another rapidly increases. Some publishers are overly keen on adding many fields for filtering within search, but remember that the more fields and search variables, the fewer results will appear.

6. Sitemaps are for readers and now for Google too
Sitemaps may not be the most exciting aspect of web publishing, but many sites still overlook them. Now that search engines have a way of recognising them and harnessing them to speed up the website indexing process, they have become useful tools for assisting discoverability for those who already know the brand.

How do I get more page views from the people already on my site? We’re an online consumer magazine and have a low number of page views per person.

Retaining online audiences is something many media owners invest far too little time and attention in. Yet it is much cheaper to reacquire an existing customer than to acquire a completely new customer, so by building loyalty among existing readers the firm is well on the way to boosting the traffic and activity on the site.

A good model is to think of the sink with a tap of water pouring in new customers and a plug hole where existing traffic is draining out. Plug the hole just slightly and it has a dramatic affect on the audience volumes.

Examine ways to open up a relationship with existing users to help them reconnect with the content. Here are some of the most effective ways of quickly changing the engagement levels with existing users:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a way of helping existing readers get reminded about the brand
2. Email newsletters are the most powerful way of maintaining contact with occasional readers: create newsletters that take elements of the website and package them into a format easy to send and click through from
3. RSS feeds are increasingly powerful in helping sophisticated readers find the right material and content
4. Encourage bookmarking, and social bookmark use such as Delicious – getting into bookmarks means customers will be reminded about the brand regularly, raising awareness as well as click rates
5. Syndicating content: look for good partners to syndicate headlines and simple feeds to ensure content is easily discoverable by audiences who know the brand
6. For mainstream consumer brands, desktop ticker devices like Skinkers can be a great way of staking a claim for the most previous real-estate on the web: get into the customer’s desktop or bookmarks is getting into the front of their mind on a regular basis

How do I keep audiences coming back to my website? (We’re an online magazine)

Boosting the traffic to websites is a ceaseless challenge and as many businesses become increasingly reliant on their web presence to acquire customers or deliver messaging, the marketing of that web presence needs an increasing amount of attention.

For media owner websites there are the additional challenges that stem from the tight relationship between internet traffic and revenues (on every page there are ads the media owner only gets paid for when the page is viewed so the more views, the more ads, the more income).

Building sustainable audiences to an online media property takes focus and effort, but smart publishers plan out a strategy for customer acquisition and retention. After all it’s easy to buy ten thousand clicks from Google, but getting the right people and getting them to stay takes skill and insight.

Start with a strategy for strong audience acquisition mechanisms. Examine ways to make the content of a site discoverable by non-users and invest in content development to ensure that there is a tight match between the content created and the ways people might look for that content in search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) remains the most effective long term tool for customer acquisition
Create body copy in the stories which is written with Google in mind: ditch some of the more flamboyant headlines and look for language that creates immediate clicks
Email newsletters are a great way of maintaining contact with occasional readers, but also to reach new readers by encouraging them to forward their news to a colleague
PR channels both offline and online can provide some of the most creative thinking about audience acquisition and there’s a tight relationship between PR and some of the most outstanding thinking in viral marketing
The new generation of social media are proving powerful ways to raise awareness, although not necessarily delivering large volumes straight away
RSS feeds are a way of helping the more web savvy users stay in touch and monitor a site’s content, but they are only one form of feeds, and with similar techniques available to supply content and headlines into FaceBook profiles and other channels, having the content in this form can prove extremely flexible
For mainstream consumer brands, desktop ticker devices like Skinkers can be a great way of staking a claim for the most previous real-estate on the web: get into the customer’s desktop or bookmarks is getting into the front of their mind on a regular basis

And then there are the range of tools and techniques of cross promotion in moving audiences between media channels. Here are a few quick tips:

Weave the web address into the masthead and logo
Give the website a clear positioning in the mind of the reader: “See updates, live, online at …”
Use house advertising to drive specific propositions; rather than generic messages about the website, link the location of the advert to a specific message such as something like this in the cricket section of a printed newspaper ‘More cricket news and team archives online at…’ or this in a directory of a business magazine “For more listings of leading suppliers, with web addresses and online reviews, visit…”
Take the URL into all merchandising so the publication echoes the website at every point
Check that web addresses are always present in online and offline advertising campaigns

How do I boost traffic to my website? We’re a media owner and although our traffic is okay, I don’t get the sense that we’re really getting what we should from the market.

Getting started in online media sales

Audience is the starting point. Without a strong audience, even the best person has nothing to sell. Begin by looking for ways to boost your traffic by acquiring more audiences from search engines and online partners and ensuring your content is quickly and easily discoverable. Put the energy into building the audience first and then let the growth create a sellable commodity.

Once you are focussed on developing the audiences, here are five simple starting steps in getting set for online advertising sales.

Develop a simple set of ad formats (use those from the Digital Media Sales Academy as the starting point)
Create ‘charter packages’ using a sponsorship model to take key clients onto the web with you
Train your team in the basics for online sales (look out for the next Academy dates for public courses if you are a small publisher especially
Put in place the analytics you need to be able to track the growth of online advertising and audiences, reporting the right information at the right speed back to your advertisers
Build up an audience database of email addresses so you can begin email newsletter publishing that will take content and links to them (next programme in the UK is 7 March) http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/online_advertising_sales.php

Remember that Digital’s tutors often come into companies to help out in the development of business plans and sales operations early on, so why not give us a call?

How do we get started in online advertising? We’re completely new to this.

Reader loyalty: a new dynamic

The web is different when it comes to loyalty not just because every site is only a click away, but because the bond between reader and publication is often more transient. Consider a visitor who stumbles into a site once through a search term, sees a couple of pages and then hits the ‘back’ button. In the early days of web publishing, webmasters made the mistake of believing these viewers were similar in their nature to the readers of a printed magazine or newspaper: not so. With printed titles there is often a cash purchase, or in a controlled circulation title there is the relationship between giving data in exchange for regularly receiving a publication. This type of behaviour becomes part of the working or living routine of an individual and these readers are far more loyal and focussed than the causal traffic delivered so much of the time by search engines.

Think about the security of these relationships. Often print will have a higher share of voice and a stronger bond with the reader. The chances are that they also only receive a few titles whereas on the web everything is only a click away

We can cover some of these issues on the next Digital Publishing Strategy Academy - 27 March http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/building_stronger_online_publi.php

Is there a difference in reader loyalty between the web and print?

Improving the quality of registrations

There’s a challenging balance between capturing audience data and capturing high quality audience data. At a simple level, the bigger the incentive, the better the quality of the data.

It’s a fair exchange to ask for some simple contact details in exchange for reading the content of a website for free, but this is just the start. Tagging your content and seeing who views what will help you build up richer profiles than you’ll get from asking people, and even of there are no demographics attached to the viewer, you’ll still know the key things most advertisers want to know: are they interested in the right products?

Try offering something that involves printed materials having to be sent. That might mean you need to give them a coupon, offer, or prize draw, but it’s a way of helping boost the quality of address details providing the inventive is high enough.

One of the most successful tactics is to build up profile data gradually over time, and not asking too much at the starting moment of registration. Smart publishing systems will let users see some of the information in terms of their claimed preferences, and encourage them to edit and add to it.

Try finding small incentives you can give them to gain additional information. It might be access to a different service, the download of a white paper, or the participation in a survey or poll.

We can cover some of these issues on the next Digital Publishing Strategy Academy - 27 March http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/building_stronger_online_publi.php

But they also come up in the Digital Media Sales Academy (next programme in the UK is 7 March) http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/online_advertising_sales.php

How to we tell if registrations in our community sites are legitimate?

Selecting the right channel for the right user

Even as enthusiastic digital publishing trainers, we know that not everyone is ready for digital channels and that’s fine. Part of the skill in media and marketing is knowing your audience and what they want. That applies to the formats and channels as well as the content. Some audiences will prefer their media by email, others in print, or by web or by RSS. The trick is to develop editions of the content which work within each of these channels. For example, here at Digital we produce weekly email news digests marketers can sign up for, as well as printed reports that are given out at training events and the main web editions of our publications. There’s even a mobile edition at www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/mobile as well as RSS feeds from many of our pages.

Let people chose the channel they want. There’s no need to force them from one to the other unless the economics of the business prevent print publishing from continuing. Give audiences choices about email editions, RSS and web editions alongside the print titles and they’ll gravitate to the channel that’s right for them.

We can cover some of these issues on the next Digital Publishing Strategy Academy - 27 March http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/building_stronger_online_publi.php

How do we deal with the changing readership ages: the web is all young people, print is older. How do we move people from print to web?

What types of online communities are there?

There are many different groups of online communities and to help publishers new to the ideas of community and the issues they present, we put together a short report that explained some of the key issues.

Getting to grips with online communities: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/insight/2006/04/welcome_to_the_party.php

I’m lost in the maze of communities – are there different structures and formats in place?

Building online communities

Publishers can create the framework for a community, but nurturing the debate takes time and energy. Look for ways to engage participants and create dialogue by actively encouraging the star posters, and create opportunities for other posters to make light comments. Look for ways to engage readers and help them become posters (star ratings and voting can be a good way of doing this), and make the model of involvement an easy one to follow.

At Digital we normally spend a day looking just at communities, and the next Digital Publishing Strategy Academy - 27 March. Details are here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/building_stronger_online_publi.php

How to build online communities? We’ve tried out forums and simple things, but not had great results.

Structurally how do we organise ourselves most effectively for online media?

There is a difference between the economics that govern effectiveness in classic media where decentralised control enables greater innovation and creativity, and those in digital businesses where greater centralisation creates economies of scale and creativity at local level is most effective when channelled into the content rather than the structural framework. It’s a debate in the publishing industry and one that often leads to tensions. The exact solution and structure will be different for every firm based on their competencies, markets, people, and needs. But to help frame the debate we wrote up some thoughts about some of the principles that can guide effective decision making. They are in the form of a lesson that can be accessed here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/digitalmediasalesacademy/2007/08/postacademy_exercise_organisat.php

What’s the most effective way of organising yourselves in digital publishing?

Google’s revenues show the changing form of online media

Outside of the US, it’s only the UK where they declare that number. In 2007 it was over $2.5bn in the UK for the first time (accounting for 15% of their total). We’ve added a few more notes, here http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/02/google_revenues_in_the_uk_top.php

What’s Google’s revenue?

CraigsList: the most successful example of free classified publishing

Craig Newmark never set out to create one of the world’s leading classified listings websites. When we interviewed him it was clear that in spite of the massive traffic success, there was a clear reluctance to monetize it the way the commercial sector instantly would. Read the Digital Thought Leader interview, here - http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2005/12/craig_newmark.php

What’s the business model for CraigsList?

Understanding Wikipedia demands an alternative perspective

The Wiki Foundation is unlike almost any publishing company. We interviewed UK CEO Alison Wheeler to explore their beliefs and the implications for publishers: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2007/10/alison_wheeler_uk_ceo_wikimedi.php

Wikipedia: what’s their model?

Self-service is the key to online classfieds

The big success for online classifieds has been the migration to the self service model. By creating a framework that advertisers can use easily, there’s the scope to let them build out as many listings as they need in a way that’s time efficient for all parties. One of the toolkits that caught our eye was CityTools from internet veteran Bob Cauthorn and when we last interviewed him we wrote up some of the ideas he believes are driving the next generation of online classifieds… http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2008/01/bob_cauthorn.php

Are there alternative models for classifieds?

Web 3.0: innovation doesn’t stop

There are lots of perspectives on the third paradigm, and a battle raging between the academics. The views of French intellectual Joel de Rosnay are particularly interesting, and following my interview with him, we wrote up a few words here: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2007/07/joel_de_rosnay.php

What is Web 3.0?

The next phase of online advertising products: examples from Google
We’ve written an answer about this here in the form of a short article http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/01/online_ad_products_more_innova.php

What are Google’s next online advertising products?

The interview with The Guardian’s CEO is here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/interview_and_exercise_carolyn/ and there’s a podcast that can be accessed from it which gives you more of the colour and conviction of what they’re doing.

What is The Guardian’s newspaper’s strategy?

Comparing sites without buying toolkits

If you’re not buying the NetRatings or Comscore rankings in Europe, then Alexa is a good free alternative. There’s an example of the output for different British newspapers just here http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/web_audiences_in_media_propert/ or follow this link into Alexa and manipulate the source data: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/mozilla.com?site0=Guardian.co.uk&site1=metro.co.uk&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=3m&size=Medium

How do we compare online audiences between media sites quickly?

Selecting an online sales house

We’ve written an answer about this here http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/enter_your_digital_training_ac/ and put together a simple training handout for you about the key issues, here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/preacademy_reading/

Should we use an online sales house to clear our spare adspace?

Trends in online advertising

There are many ways to examine this, but we’ve highlighted a few key trends and placed them in the Digital Training Academy pages, here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/strategy_online_advertising_tr/

What are the big online advertising trends for the next 18 months?

How can online sales houses help web publishers?

Many firms decide they could use the additional help of a sales house to turn part of their remnant inventory into income. Typically a sales house will be able to bring in advertising that the firm cannot normally gather, boosting total revenues and keeping the sales team tightly focussed where it matters most.

Those new clients might be from companies that are outside of the vertical sector that the web publisher specialises in - for example consumer motoring titles will tend to have their clients concentrated in the motoring sector and may not have strong relationships with advertisers who are interested in the demographic of the readerships but from outside that industry. The sales houses might also be able to unlock revenues from other countries if the audiences are large enough – many British and Spanish publishers have high audiences from North America and Latin America, and while their national advertisers may not benefit from exposures to foreign audiences, there are bound to be national advertisers in north and Latin America where those audiences could be profitably sold.

Sometimes sales houses are simply used to offload remnant inventory that could not be sold otherwise, but some publishers may trust them with premium inventory as well. Now that behaviourally targeted advertising ahs become such a powerful driver of online media buying, there’s the additional benefit of making inventory available to behavioural partners and using this to extract a much higher yield for space which otherwise might have had to be sold as low grade ‘run-of-site’.

To help publishers navigate some of the key issues to ask firms, we put together some notes that guide you through some of the steps and the key questions to consider before commissioning. You can download them here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/preacademy_reading/

Can sales houses make a big difference to revenues if they’re hired by web publishers?

Where is the B2B online advertising revenue?

Business to business brands have moved to the web and switched their marketing budgets into three clear areas. There’s been a massive investment in building their own websites and although not seen as an advertising spend (because there is no paid-for media) in the mind of the marketer it is still a marcoms budget that faces the choices of either being in print advertising, the web or other media.

Then there is the investment in email, building powerful eCRM models to gain real traction with customers and prospects, maintaining relationships through email and other sales channels in a way that is structured around real sales models and messaging.

Finally there is search. Most B2B brands are investing in search engine optimisation, even if not search engine advertising, and as they do this it leads them towards re-orientating their marketing focus to help customers find them on the web and engage in the buying journey. For many business to business marketers search engines present an easy fix to customer acquisition: whether it’s the optimisation tools that improve the ranking of editorial text inside search engines, or the pay per click advertising that can be switched on and off like a tap of customers, it’s a seductive pitch to brands that need accountable marketing spend and have already invested heavily in the channel.

Business to business magazines have to re-earn their status on the web because they are competing in this very different landscape. That’s why many business publishing groups have invested heavily in developing their own vertical search and online directories. It’s not that the business magazine websites don’t have the right audience or the right editorial environment for the advertiser, it’s simply that there are alternatives that many advertisers gravitate to first in order to get the marketing engine of their website working, and once that’s complete they move on to planning their online media campaigns. Business magazine websites can make powerful arguments for being involved much earlier, but from our experience of teaching media planners and business brands, the business magazine sales teams will need to work hard to place web media high on the agenda.

Search engines are taking over half all online advertising spend in the UK and a few other markets. By looking at the keywords people search on, it's clear how many B2B advertisers have already made the switch.

There are more discussions of issues related to these in the Digital Media Sales Academy classroom: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/digitalmediasalesacademy/

Whilst we have seen massive gains made in B2C advertising online, the market for B2B advertising has been a far slower environment. Do you eventually see this sector catching up? What are the hurdles B2B titles are facing and how do we overcome them?

Can subscriptions be a big revenue in consumer online publishing?

Since the very early days of web media there has always been a presumption that paid subscriptions will be a key element of the mix of revenues publishers have, broadly echoing the models familiar in consumer magazines and newspapers in terms of the balance between editorial and advertising.

I disagree. And have done since I started researching the models for online publishing in the mid 90s. When every competitor is only a single click away, and you compete on a global stage, and that competition includes any content and not just that of media groups, then the mindset of the reader is radically different. That doesn’t mean that there are not powerful revenue streams in some areas – and the compulsive content of the premium sports sector, online games and the adult industry are all good examples – but these are exceptions to the rule rather than a model to follow. In business publishing where the information has commercial value there are different models at play, but on the whole subscription revenues for web content are a false promise.

The economics of the web lean towards being an advertising funded media channel and that means publishers have to work on developing models that maximise page inventory and audience traffic to most effectively monetise the content they have.

With titles such as the Wall Street Journal turning their back on paid-for content on the web, is there still a future for subscription-led publications online?

Reaching out to international audiences

As a global medium the internet is certainly the route to quickly reaching international audiences. But many publishers find that while it can be a great place to find potential customers for print titles, if the people themselves are heavy web users then they might prefer their content in a more digital form. This means that the publisher needs to be thinking about web content, email editions and online archives from the very start. For many business and directory publishers the economics of web content and advertising are heavily skewed in their favour – if they get the formula right. On the one hand there’s none of the production costs of print and distribution, but for the customer there’s potentially a massive uplift in functionality and benefit:

• Archives that make everything accessible at a single click
• Fresher news and content than a weekly or monthly printing cycle could ever manage
• Linkages that can take viewers to deeper information inside or outside of the site
• Microsites that can build out knowledge in a given specialism

And that’s before the thousands of ideas generated from the Web 2.0 era of digital publishing.

Here in Western Europe, some domestic businesses have really benefited by the volume of international audiences. Newspaper and magazine sites in Spain and the UK get a massive boost of traffic from foreign visitors and it’s been one of the driving forces since the start of online news publishing. For many sites the overseas contingent can easily top 50% and ComScore data at the start of 2008 suggested that among the UK media properties The Mail gets 69 percent of visitors from overseas, BBC 59 percent, Telegraph.co.uk 57 percent, Guardian 56 percent and Times 55 percent. The same models and issues are true for the Spanish speaking sites, with media properties from Spain enjoying disproportionate traffic from Latin America. Many media groups miss these dynamics because in print and broadcast, the model has traditionally been about producing and distributing locally. However, with increased globalisation of media savvy directors at the BBC and The Guardian are now actively targeting overseas audiences with special editions, services and content. This has invited some publishers to consider creating special editions for key markets such as www.GuardianAmerica.com from the UK’s Guardian Media Group.

Hi,

I am the editor of a monthly trade magazine. We are looking to develop our international subscriber base and believe the best way to do this will be via the web. However, this is quite new to me and I'm not really sure how to go about doing it. Do you have any advice on where we should start, please?

Many thanks

Becky

Managing and nurturing blogs, wikis and social media

One of the greatest challenges for classic editorial teams is to get the model right for online audience participation. Blogging moved from the margins to the mainstream of digital publishing around 2003, changing the way firms could relate to their customers, and offering the potential to transform the role of personal and corporate communications, as well as creating a new media format. Overnight it seemed like everyone could have a voice; however that neither means everyone has something to say, nor that everyone has a chance of being heard. By developing their own blogs, or carefully raising discussion and comment on those run by others, brands also discovered they could influence the environment and extend their footprint to reach wider audiences. This makes for a potentially explosive mix when free speech and commerce play out in the discussions on your own site. Discussions can head anywhere, and ultimately only the community itself can judge the value of its contributors.

For media owners blogs, forum environments and the other social media can be an exceptionally powerful, cost-effective and intimate way of publishing and engaging with audiences. But for this to work it means crafting the discussion and being clear about the types of content and posts that are on topic and within the right model for the brand. The fact the digital networked society has given a voice to anyone doesn’t mean blogs and wikis shouldn’t be retrospectively moderated, or that they are the only way of displaying information.

When data needs structure, tagging and taxonomy, media owners are expertly placed to provide it. Give freedom to the audience, but try setting that freedom within a framework that creates more value in their contributions and delivers back more value to them in their experience as a customer. This democratisation of access to discussion can be a powerful ally in creating rich and immersive web content, but a clear strategy needs to be in place and a clear model there with it.

For more on blogs try this Digital Insight Report ‘A blog is for life and not just for Christmas’

For more on communities try this Digital Insight Report ‘Join the party: Getting a handle on online communities’

As an editor the switch to Web 2.0-type publishing e.g. twikis and blogs fills me with horror. In particular the way in which the content is often compiled in a seemingly endless list with limited structure or navigation. Should web editors intervene to organise these streams of consciousness?

Understanding your audiences

When the internet emerged as a mainstream publishing medium, it drew from traditional publishing practices and then developed a life of its own. The ‘Web 2.0’ models are typically those native to online media, while those before are ones that were anchored in classic media – albeit already evolving to suit the new environment. In terms of audiences, some groups – like the IT business sector or the youth gaming markets – have been at the early adopter end of the spectrum, while other groups have been much less ready to embrace the new channels.

This leaves it to publishers to read the landscape and assess where their audiences are and what they need for the next step in the journey to consuming media and entertainment through these different environments. It’s rare that a single publisher can move the market, so the strategy the publishing coaching team here at Digital support is one of watching where the market is heading and moving just ahead of the pace of your customers. Remember that some people still don’t have mobile phones and break out in a cold sweat at the mention of the work ‘PC’. If they prefer their media through other channels then respect that choice and work with the customers who are in the right mindset as well as the right medium.

2008 is the year that video advertising will take off in Europe. The formats have been available for almost 10 years, but it's only now that the fast bandwidth, steps towards standardisation and mass market uptake have combined to create the right climate. Video tells stories brilliantly, and with many big budget advertisers already investing heavily in television, video on the web is a further and cost effective way of getting more life from the expensive creative assets they've already invested in.

There are numerous advertising models around video, so many that we spend a whole day in some of our Publishing Strategy Academies just looking at video advertising. The two that feel strongest to us at the moment are pre-roll clips (these play before the editorial programming) and companion banners (these sit alongside the video within the page or the player while the video is running). The only caveat is to keep the pre-rolls short. This is a new area for many internet users and the acceptable standards are yet to emerge, however, putting a 30 second TV commercial in front of a 30 second news clip is certainly out of balance. in general pre-rolls of less than 7 seconds seem to be strong enough on brand impact to deliver a client message, but short enough not to trigger the 'back button' effect. As with most digital publishing there's no substitute for the real thing, so our advice is to try out different models as a test and watch the metrics in your web analytics. There's more tips on Web Analytics in our Digital Analytics Academy classroom, here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/analytics/

What is the perfect model for video?

Behavioural targeting is the umbrella terms the industry has given to a range of technology tools and processes that allow advertising to be delivered to viewers based on their known interests. the data for interests can be gathered in many ways, but typically it involves looking at the types of content they have viewed and then matching advertising to those content categories. There is a wide variety of tools that can do this, but the business effect is typically the same: a viewer with a known profile (even of they are anonymous) is worth much more than a viewer on most of the pages of a site.

Finance and business advertising is a good example because in the newspaper industry these are typically sectors which are sold out: there just isn't the space for more advertising because it's in such high demand. however if the same reader then clicks through to news or sport (areas that usually have a lower average value in advertising sales than Finance or Business), then the advertising they see can continue to be the advertising type that was appearing in Finance.

It is one of the core tools of yield management and an easy way for many newspaper groups to boost their advertising revenue. In any media property where there is a high differential between the run-of-site rates it can make a major difference.

In terms of audiences it's important to be clear and transparent with how data is used, even if it's anonymous cookie data. There are clear data protection laws in place in most countries, but smart publishers are often ahead of the law, making clear to audiences exactly what's happening. After all, there is an unwritten contract with the viewer: here is great content for free, but it's paid for by the advertising. If audiences want the quality and richness of content that online media groups have invested in, then it's a fair exchange. And for those who would prefer sites not to be funded by advertising, the acid test is how they react when that payment option is there for them to choose: 99.99% of times, it's straight back to the advertising pages

Why is behavioural targeting key to newspapers, and won’t our readers opt out if we track them for advertising delivery?

This is a point I made in one of our strategy coaching sessions, but before we answer, it needs some context. Online advertising can be targeted by most ad servers and media owners to be seen only by computers in the country the publisher is based in. In classic media the issue rarely crops up because newspapers, outdoor, radio and television, in general, have been geographically constrained.

The issue comes when a significant portion of an audience are outside of the target geography for a campaign. That's because advertising budgets are normally planned and executed at national level, and this is how the advertising and marketing industry has always been structured. The fact the web is a global media channel shouldn't be at odds with this, but it does raise issues for how media groups structure their advertising sales and delivery.

Remember that the targeting of adverts so they are only seen by certain IP addresses has been around a long time and is now a rock solid process at national level. Almost all IP addresses in the technically sophisticated markets can be tracked accurately at a much more granular level, so even though you can't be sure who the individual is, you can be sure of their country. And that's something that increasingly agencies and clients will be asking for in countries and sectors that have websites with high reach outside their national boundaries.

For English sites in the UK and US, and Spanish language sites in Spain there is often a massive overseas audience that may be logging on. The UK is one of the most extreme cases of this where newspapers often have more than half their audiences coming from outside, and many have created separate content to service international audiences. In these extremes, the markets actually have a new sales opportunity: the chance to team up with a local sales force or sales network in the country where the traffic originates.

Geotargeting: is the lack of geotargeting in many countries really a problem?

This is a point I made in one of our strategy coaching sessions, but before we answer, it needs some context. Online advertising works. It's powerful, engaging and impactful. However, the formats that were created and popularised in the waves of ad format product releases (1996, 98 and 2003) have lost their novelty and some of their impact. I've been privileged to chair the online advertising standards taskforce for ten years, the group that in the UK and then across Europe, worked on getting the formats of web advertising right, and yes, I'm a real fan of skyscrapers, leaderboards and MPUs.

However, as an industry it's important media groups recognise this because when agencies are asking for different formats and structures, this is often what drives their desire. In the early days of the online ad industry there was a backlash against formats that wasn't justified; the latest research from Dynamic Logic is quantifying the change in advertising effectiveness.

Dynamic Logic have run more studies into online advertising effectiveness than anyone, so this gives them a great database of resources to work from. Online brand campaigns are typically measured using consumer surveys that compare the brand metrics of awareness, purchase intent and brand image statements among people who have seen the advertising to those who have not. The difference between the two (the delta or uplift) is what the advertiser is really buying - an important reminder if a publisher things they are only buying the media space.

What Dynamic Logic have discovered in recent research is that advertising effectiveness has declined for two years in a row. They say that over the last two consecutive years, on average, ad dollars are having less of an impact than they were before. The research proves that the effects are still high, and that online is powerful and engaging, but on average there is a notable drop than two years ago. There are a number of factors that could be driving this, including the sample bias (more campaigns are tested now so it's not just the best in class brands and agencies who want to be better), there are more agencies producing online content than ever before (the implication here is that some creatives could still be finding their feet), but one element is bound to be that web savvy consumers are faster at scanning web pages to find the content they need and pay a little less attention to the advertising.

For online publishers there needs to be an ongoing review of formats, but the effectiveness of web advertising should never be examined in isolation. Remember that even if there's a slight drop in online ad effectiveness, the web stacks up powerfully against other channels, offering a scale of impact that matches or exceeds those channels and great advertising ROI.

Why is there less of an impact with banner advertising today?

Video: that's the quick answer because within a couple of years every site will have video exploding from its screens the way we have regular graphics and flash now.

But in terms of what's already available to everyone, then at the moment I'm really excited about web analytics. Analytics is giving the deepest of insights into how customers buy and at what point the buying process fails. Whether it's tracking the open rates on emails or the conversion rates within a website, the data is now there. You can tell exactly how many people did, and didn't respond to the most specific call to action. Apply the same thinking screen by screen across your ecommerce store and you can scientifically analyse exactly how people behave.

Harnessed well this means your organisation can become a learning organisation, ever improving the way it works, thinks and behaves. Constant improvements in customer conversion rates at each step in the buying process have a transformative effect on the business.

But right now there's a disconnect. Most firms have web analytics in place. Yet hardly any have the data analysts to make sense of the results. Worse still is that even fewer have empowered these data analysts to drive website design, to feed their knowledge back into the process of building and rebuilding web pages to deliver better conversion rates. It's another massive missed opportunity, and yet look into the leading digital retail businesses like Amazon, Tescos, LastMinute and EBay and you'll find a whole management structure that does this. Publishers are particular victims of the disconnect.

Take the guesswork out of publishing development, unlock the potential of your customer data, transform your business.

What's the most under-used tool for online publishers?

This is key for boosting your traffic because you’re helping make your pages discoverable by the viewers.

- Internal search tools will boost your pages per person per visit metrics

- Put the search box on every page

- Check that your search tools are covering all your blogged and community content as well as the main editiorial

- Code your video and flash content with meta-data and descriptions that make it discoverable by search

What are people's thoughts about putting search into their sites?

- There are loads of ways blogs can help boost the content and revenues of consumer and business-facing magazines.

- I wrote up a few of the ideas here as an article www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2007/10/a_blog_is_for_life_and_not_jus.html

- You can find out more in the Blogging Academy Classroom we run: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/bloggingclassroom/

- There are lots of hurdles to creating successful blogs, and ironically many firms leap straight to the technology and the production process. On the Digital Blogging Academy, we’ve found that taking a step back to gather your thoughts helps you evaluate what you’re doing and decide where and how you use your effort. To help you, we’ve uncovered a series of simple questions that are worth reflecting on before launching yourself and your team into the blogosphere. For the seasoned marketer they may all be obvious, but they’re worth some discussion with your colleagues before making that commitment.

1. Do you have something to say?

2. Is what you say interesting to your community?

3. Can you articulate what you want to say effectively?

4. Can you produce and sustain your voice and your space?