This has been a week full of stories about newspapers – both offline and online
The Newspaper Association of America announced that traffic to newspaper websites increased 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009 attracting an average of 73.3 million monthly unique visitors.
When asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content Rupert Murdoch said “The current days of the internet will soon be over.” He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.
“If they continue to allow free access to their content they will go out of business because there’s not enough advertising revenue coming in, whereas if they charge for content they will lose a huge chunk of their audience; and their influence in shaping the news agenda will wane completely,” write InfoWars.com.
So where is the online news audience? Where should your news content be to have influence and shape perceptions?
Another Nielsen report named the top ten news site for March. News aggregators Google News, Yahoo! News and AOL News all made it into the top ten. In March Yahoo! News got more than half the number of unique visitors to all the newspaper sites combined. (37,902,000) AOL News is not that far behind. (23,604,000)
Search is definitely the winner when it comes to news traffic. To reach the people looking for news online your press releases and other news content must be visible in these news aggregators – Yahoo! News, AOL News and Google News.
What do you have to do to achieve this?
- Optimize your news content for search.
- Distribute it on a major wire service
- Pitch your story to an online news site that gets indexed in Yahoo! News
- Syndicate your news content in feeds (RSS) so that it gets picked up published by other sites. Watch this video for an explanation of why you need to use feeds.
Many PR professionals are adding keywords to press releases and using a wire service that offers SEO features.
But good optimization is more than throwing in a few keywords. Writing for search means a new way of thinking about your press releases and other news content.
PR Tool:
I have created a step-by-step instruction sheet for optimizing releases for search. Each step uses specific tools and websites. the instructions come in a toolbar that has all the websites and tools needed for each step.
You can download it free on the PRESSfeed website.
Let me know what you think.
