Advertising and Marketing
Advertising Your Site
Just because you've built a wonderful new website doesn't mean visitors will automatically find it. Even before you launch, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to attract visitors - first-time users and repeat customers, content consumers a...
Viral Marketing
What we once called “word-of-mouth” has given rise to something known as “viral marketing.” Viral marketing is more than simply hoping your most ardent supporters will mention your site as they go about their lives. Viral marketing is a marketing message...
RSS Feeds
RSS is an efficient way to get information quickly from the web. Basically, it drives information from the web directly to readers instead of forcing those readers to surf a list of bookmarked sites. Think of it as the difference between subscribing to...
Getting and Giving Links
Current thinking on when to provide links recommends adding as many outside links as are appropriate for the content you’re providing. This is a significant reversal from the linking theories of the web's early years, when many news sites adopted policies o...
Using Twitter for promotion and community
Twitter, the leading service for microblogging, was quickly adopted by dozens - then hundreds - of news outlets in 2008.
Sales, Fundraising and E-Commerce
Putting Ads on Your Site
Now that you're an Internet publisher, you may look at advertising in an entirely different light from when you were just an Internet user. Users are seldom big fans of ads. But as a publisher, you not only want to draw readers for your content, you also...
Identifying Revenue and Sales Opportunities
As you plan for the launch of your site, you should think about how you are going to keep it going once it gets off the ground. You'll need funds to pay for such things as your web hosting service, software, telephones and some equipment, such as computers...
Selling Advertising
Advertising is one of the most common ways to raise money. To sell ads, however, you have to identify potential advertisers, establish prices, and establish guidelines for content. Selling ads may also mean you need a sales representative or sales staff.
Who...
Maintaining Ethics and Standards
Whether you're just trying to make enough to cover your hosting costs or building your website as a full-time business, money talks. Even those who start out with the best intentions can be led astray by the lure of a big ad buy.
To maintain your operation's...
Tracking Your Users
Why Traffic Matters
From the moment you launch your site, you can expect people to ask: What's your website traffic?
It's critical that you start tracking your visitors at launch so that you can gauge your site's growth. And it's important that your tracking tools give...
Understanding Traffic
The most widely used metrics for measuring traffic to your site involve counting page views, visits and unique visitors. They all measure different things and all have shortcomings that affect their reliability. In addition, time spent on site, bounce...
Traffic Software
What are robots and spiders?
These small programs are sent out by search engines like Yahoo and Google to track and catalog the growth of the Web. They look for new pages, or new information on existing pages, and send back reports to their respective...
Surveys
From the moment you launch your site, you should create ways to listen to the responses of people who visit it. Sometimes your readers will initiate responses through comment forms. At other times you'll want to solicit feedback, perhaps through an online...
Tracking Services
Web-based tracking services are the most common practice for measuring your traffic.
You simply copy and paste a small piece of JavaScript code provided by the service into the HTML of every page on your site. The code keeps track of everyone who visits...
Law and Ethics
Deep Linking
Deep linking is the term for linking to an interior page of another site, instead of to its home page. For instance, when you link readers to a story in the international section of the New York Times instead of to the Times' front page, you're deep linking.
It's...
Copyright and Attribution
Copyright: Your own
Copyright is a tricky idea, and there are many overarching legal battles going on relating to copyright and the Internet. It's natural to be a little confused about it. As a web publisher, you also have two look at copyright from...
Online Libel Issues
Quality publications build solid reputations on competent factual reporting and sage editorials. Losing your footing on these foundations for even one paragraph can expose you to legal liability and a loss of credibility. The resignations of top editors...
Legal Issues for Online Publishers
Terms and Conditions of Use for Your Site
A "Terms of Use" statement is a must for a website, especially one that offers resources or solicits input and interaction from users. These statements clearly set out how resources may be used and what your ...