News

Use Reader Interaction to Boost Integrated Program Sales

As sales people, we want to help our advertisers achieve their goals – their success is our success. Niche publications are perfectly positioned to offer special services to advertisers by utilizing our high reader engagement and our special connection with our narrowly targeted audiences. As ad sales pros, we need to utilize this connection to maximize the effectiveness of our advertisers' campaigns. But don't just offer these extras to everybody! Save them as special extras for fully integrated buys.

Minimize Unsubscribes from Advertiser E-Mail Blasts

Your list is the lifeblood of your email efforts. By utilizing careful planning and best practices, you can keep you list healthy. You can generate a lot of revenue through sponsored e-mail blasts and advertising-driven e-newsletters. However, you need to take care with how you create email blasts to prevent a subscriber revolt.

Your Editor is a Revenue Generator!

By Rob O'Regan, Editor at eMediaVitals

Page views are increasingly viewed as a poor way to measure advertising performance. They're not so hot for gauging editorial performance, either.

For many digital publishers, chasing page views to drive advertising revenue has had a negative impact on the quality of the content published online. So-called "page-view journalism" can result in endless posts and slide shows about popular topics ("Beyonce Is Pregnant!"), but it doesn't necessarily serve a publisher's core audience – or its advertisers – well.

But there's a better way to measure the effectiveness of online content, in a way that rewards journalists for quality while improving the value proposition for advertisers: Engagement.

Granted, "engagement" is one of those fuzzy metrics that means different things to different people. However, publishers are beginning to define more consistent ways to measure engagement – and with it, the performance of their writers and editors.

Engagement is actually a compilation of several metrics: time spent, pages per visit, bounce rate, return frequency, along with social "sharing" measures such as Twitter retweets or Facebook "likes." How does engagement translate into revenue? The more engaged users are, the more likely they are to "convert" – by registering onsite, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper, or purchasing a subscription or product from the publisher. Each conversion indicates a deeper level of engagement – while providing important profile information to the publisher and its advertisers.

Deeper engagement is driven by quality content. Good content is what convinces individuals to stay on (or come back to) a website, read related articles, or request more information on a topic. Which is why some publishers are exploring editorial compensation models that reward authors on engagement, not page views.

Increasingly, publishers and advertisers are finding that website success is not simply about driving traffic – it's about creating compelling content that attracts, retains and engages a target audience. Deeper relationships between authors and their audience will drive loyalty to a publisher's brand – and more revenue from its advertisers.