Chapter 11 Summary
This chapter covers the fundamentals of building an online audience, specifically tracking content, web analytics, search enginge optimization, writing good headlines, and distribution through social media.
Track Everything
It’s important to track everything that you publish, inclduing daily statistics that covers how many posts you get per week, the type of things that are being written about, social networking feedback, and other user-generated content.
It’s important to track your audience as well by using Web analytics software. Services like Omniture, Hitbox, and Google Analytics are great ways to track how your Web site is doing and how it performs daily.
The things to be looking for are pageviews, unique visitors, and the amount of time each user spends on your Web site.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The way marketing has been traditionally done in the past is currently being supplemented by viral marketing. Everything is found through a search engine nowadays, so in order to garner attention to your Web site, you have to know how search engines work.
Search engines do three things:
- Spiders and robots are programmed to scavenger the Internet for new pages or new information on existing pages for search engine indexing.
- The indexing itself takes all of the information gather from the spiders and robots and compiles them into a database.
- Queries take keywords entered into search engines and look into the index for the most relevant results and then presents those results to the media consumer.
Journalists use SEO to grow their audiences. The fastest way the online robots can pick up your material and index it is by assisting them by creating links that link directly to your published content. Tags are another catalyst. The same methods can be applied to video content.
Headlines
The best way to attract hits is by writing effective headlines. To attract readers, your headlines must stand out, but be simple at the same time. For the robots indexing information, it is important that you select the right text, preferably text that is repeated in the story. These keywords need to include who, what, and where.
It’s also important that while you are trying to attract robots to not SOUND like a robot. Use conversational language that occasionally has a bit of attitude. An article can be well-written, but no one will read it if the headline is boring.
Social Distribution
As noted earlier, the way to go now is through viral marketing. The way to achieve viral success is by targeting specifics outlets on the Web so your content is featured on every type of channel possible to maximize your audience. Make sure your content links to social networks, blogs, video and photo sites like YouTube and Flickr, and bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon.
