I personally use these as experimental platforms to learn things and make mistakes with: do something meaningless. Post a blog that no one is going to look at! Make mistakes on something that does not matter. Whatever your objective is, get stuff on line.
The harder part is aggregating and building an audience. Do experiments with that. I had my birthday party recently. I went way out there. I had a Twitter Feed set up and a Tumblr account. I ended up owning the term 'MT40' in the top 10 search results. It's actually not that hard to do, but it requires practice. First thing is to come up with a moniker that' unique and then getting out there with as many lines as you can. A Twitter account, a blog etc.
They don't take that long to get set up, but take time to maintain. Your experiments will teach you how long it takes something to get into the search engine. If you're on the second page of Google, you're invisible pretty much. If you're trying to own a debate or a point of view, you need to understand the language of it and understand who is competing for it. You need to understand that line of inquiry. You need to know what is the question people are asking and then you want to own that page.
Using Google Ads:You can use Google ads to direct traffic to your site. It only takes a couple of hours to become a reasonably competent enough to do it. You just go to Google Advertising programs and sign up. (Can also be found in the fine print at the bottom of any Google page). In terms of identifying 'key words' to use, they will suggest things to you. In NY there is a big ad guy who says that in a branding sense, make the biggest promise you can own. Make a claim and make it as big as possible, but not so big that you can't own it. For example: you aren't going to own food, but maybe it's 'food security' or 'food health'. You get it down so far that it won't cost millions of dollars but it's something that can attract and influence the right kind of people.
Google advertising is essentially an auction based system. You buy a word. For example, I can buy Mike Tippet. It would show up next to the search results. You could buy 'food' if you wanted to spend a bazillion dollars and change what people think of food generally.
Step one is sign on and then type in the word you think is most interesting and then do it. Then to get that placement you need to pay 'X' number of dollars. There are two ways of buying it: either impression based or per click. Impressions are based on the way they price billboards i.e. how many cars will drive by. So you pay say, for a thousand impressions. Ads on the internet work in the same way. You can buy a thousand impressions, but if you have a thousand people see your ad and nobody clicks through - then how valuable is it?
So it essentially becomes a math problem. For example, I can buy a thousand clicks for a dollar and estimate that say 10% will click through (100). So for a thousand ads that you pay a dollar for, you are really paying ten cents per click, if 100 people check you out. Google ads are kind of like stocks: you're buying means or ideas of concepts and the value will go up or down. If you wanted to buy oil spill right now, it would be very expensive! (And that is just what BP has done!)
As an example, if you go through the word 'food', it would be very expensive. The next value for assessment would be how many people search for the word food. If you had a budget of $100 that would be used up pretty quickly. Google walks you through it all. They'll show you how many people will see the ad and what the likely click through rate is. That's a function of how good the copy is. Ad copy is the hardest copy to get right. You want six or ten words to grab people's imagination, explain to why they need to click now, and suspend all their skepticism about advertising. If you get it right, its valuable.
Look at billboards or things. Less is more, be concise and get to the point. Keep it really really simple, and then test it. The nice thing about these ads is you can test your thesis. Let's say that people are interested in food security for one of three reasons: the health of families, the environment, and because they're hungry. So then let's write a catchy slogan that will appeal to each one of those three reasons. We buy a couple of thousand ads and then run a test. It's called 'abc testing' and you see which ads get the better response. You find out actually people don't care about the environment, they actually care about their family. Maybe it's about the health of your children, or something to do with health.
Making Money on the Net:
In terms of making money on the internet, if you don't have a ton of traffic, it's difficult to get a ton of revenue. You have to be pretty big to make money in that. So for non-profits, I wouldn't pin your hopes on advertising revenues unless you're going out and getting a bazillion people to your website. But, the internet is definitely a good channel to find people who are interested in supporting you. If someone wants to influence that area of thinking, they can appraoch you.
So, the first thing is to own that discussion. If you own the discussion, people who are interested in supporting it will find you. You can always run campaigns and things too. Once you have establish a credible brand then you can promote the twenty things you've done in the last year and the positive impact you've had. If you're invisible on the internet, people will say 'do they really know what they're doing?' It's a part of doing business now. And at the very least, a good way of establishing your credibility. And then you can build into your site an easy donation button so that you click and donate.
Behavioral Analysis:
You can start to get a sense from behavioural analysis of what the core thing that's going to motivate people to act and click, so you can also use Google for amazing social research. They can show you aggregates of what people are looking for. You will see which ad people click on and then you will know this is the ad that got the magic. Then you will have the benefit when running your campaign. Or type in something generic. Maybe you want to cover arts in Vancouver. If that's a focus, then find out who owns that on Google. There's research to be done there.
So, my advice would be to invest a small amount of money and do it really intelligently with an objective. What is the message that has resonance with your audience? That' s money at the end of the day. If you can get insight early on, it's worth it. It can inform your whole messaging campaign. Identify the sweet spots in the dialogue and you can use it as a way of forming your whole communication strategy. Because if you went to an ad agency they 'd say 'let's test and copy', but you don't need an ad agency. You just need to sign up.
It's all about finding the audience you want. You don't just want people to click through. If they think they're getting something general, they just click and go. You want it to be super precise to weed out anybody that's just passing.
You can find out about your audience on a site called Compete dot com that has some good demographics. These numbers give you relative measure, it's like that old line that in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, this is kind of like that. So, if you log in you can get a demographic breakdown of who your audience is.
Content vs: Audience
What you do need to understand is that it is as important or more important to get the audience, than to produce the content. It's the tree falling in the forest thing. Now public gets 5 or six million users per month. That generates a lot of interest, from everyone, including advertisers.
Our strategy is not dissimilar from a tabloid kind of mentality. Arianna Huffington is the master of this. If you go to Huffpo, you'll see that the homepage of your site is really less relevant than the traffic that comes from Google. Even the NY Times that everyone knows about gets half its traffic from Google.
That's the big question in the content business right now. If you look even at the sites that you think are destinations, the audience that just comes to them is diminishing in relation to the taffic that Google sends them. To ignore it is to be willfully blind of what people want. At the end of the day it's about human behavior and people are more interested in finding information through searching directly or through their social networks.
There's this story about a guy at the NY Times who reportedly had about 90,000 links in his history file and about a thousand that he clicked through to. So there was a proportion that he clicked on. The question that's important is what were the ones that he clicked on? Overwhelmingly they were the ones that were referred by his friends.
So, your social network is providing influence and distribution. Search and social networks are driving consumption on the web and it's less about having a destination. So you need to have something unique and valuable then you tell your friends. I get most of my news through Facebook updates. It's just the way it is.
Curating:
Curating is like when you're in an art gallery and you assemble something around a theme. In the context of news it means you can wrap up a story and run it based on something you find 'out there'. Now Public only has a small newsroom, a handful of people. We have our citizen reporters but the reality is they don't get much traffic. So we have our newsroom focus on the big stories. We don't send somebody down to the gulf, we don't need to. In this instance, they've gone out on the internet and there's a video about it. So we've embedded it into our page and have links to other stories. It's like building a collage. These are not stories that are breaking, they're maybe three paragraphs, a photograph and take ten mintues to do.
You have to be nimble when it comes to creating timely content, there's a shelf life . For example, if there was an angle to the BP oil spill there would be a few paragraphs you could write. So you can whip these stories things up, gain traction and attract an audience. I would recommend setting a target for yourself if you're going to take this seriously, like say, every week. Find something important and write up stuff about it. It's timely and when people come to your site aftewards they'll see these stories and they'll be relevant and important stories to them and all the sudden all these other things become relevant to them. So make it relevant to people's lives.
Other tips:
- If you want to find out what people are talking about on Twitter, there's a great site called Tweetmeme. These are the viral ideas people are tweeting about right now. Everyone's playing this game and finding things that are trending.
- Read up on 'How to Write Good Headlines for Google'. This will provide you with tips on how to get noticed on searches.
- Get a face-book page, a twitter page, get a blog and get set-up to publish on all of these things.
- You can check out search traffic at a site called Alexa.
- Check out: 'Newser' with the tag line 'read less know more'. Newser has a very visual front page with photos/ links to short videos, stories etc. (newser.com)
- He also showed us a website called 'Gowalla.com'. It's kind of like a 'guest book' where you 'check-in' to locations and leave messages / comments / photos about where you are and can find out who else is there or who was there recently.
- I'm blown away by what Word Press can do. It's so easy. And Blogger has really improved. Wordpress has more flexibility and more muscle but Blogger is a bit more intuitive for someone just getting into it. But if you're going to be long term in your thinking Word Press is best, because you can host it yourself. Ten years ago these type of platforms would have cost you $50,000.
- To buy domain names, try 'Go Daddy'. They're cheap. You'll find very few names with dot com at the end anymore. I've found 'dot info' is the answer.
