Regional Internet media: Part 4. Attracting visitors to the site, promotion
Attendance for online media is not exactly the same as circulation for a paper newspaper. The newspaper receives money from each sold number and advertising, and the Internet media, in general, only from advertising.
At the same time, in large advertisers, press officers and marketing specialists report, as a rule, according to formal criteria - numbers are important for them. For small companies, the real state of affairs is important, which they assess subjectively.
I assume that the number on the counter is an indicator, not a goal.
')
Before you begin to consider specific methods of attracting visitors to the site, I want to note that since we are doing regional media, the project’s target audience is local residents. They regularly visit your site, advertisers are guided by them.
In practice, the share of local visitors on popular regional sites is about 55% per week. We have 65%, our closest competitors have 56%, and the leading media attendance has 43%. At the most visited site in the region - ... 3%. In the new rating li.ru all this is visible.
Let's get down to business.
Advice: for a few weeks after the opening, do not advertise at all, if only you do not have the money to arrange and promote any contest, action or something else related to the opening of the newspaper. The site should not be empty when people come there.
Obviously, your competitors (media and other sites that live with ad sales) are unlikely to want to advertise you even for money, so look for alternatives.
In our case, very successfully the owner of the most popular regional resource (torrent tracker) was my friend. We have placed a topline informer with him on a commercial basis. True, we did it, as a reference sloopoki, a year and a half after the discovery. In fact, we received high-quality regional traffic at 1 cent for the transition in the amount of about 500 transitions per day, which was very profitable. Now this tracker, unfortunately, is closed.
Thus, regional file sharing services may well become good partners.
I would like to especially note that it is the informer that is needed, preferably with one or several interesting news, because from a simple banner sense a lot less.
I will evaluate each of the methods according to some formal criteria. Explanations to “+” and “-” in brackets to the first method.
+ Quality of the audience (+ interested local audience, - occasional visitors)
- The financial side of the issue (+ the overall budget is moderate, - relatively large investments)
+ Transition price (+ cheap, - expensive)
+ Effort (+ a little, a lot)
? Site image // Depending on how and what you will advertise (+ positive or neutral, negative)
+ Efficiency (+ many visitors, - few visitors)
Very good stuff, I recommend. Making a widget is simple, and there is a lot of benefit from it. There is no effort. You can make several widgets, offer them to the "regional program". Do not forget to advertise the widget on your site.
Our widget views more than 1,500 people every day. We can assume that if it were not for the widget, they would have gone to watch the latest news on the site, but this is not obvious.
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
+ Site Image
+ Efficiency
As I said in one of the previous parts, 100% of customers of any local provider are your target audience. At the same time, providers, as a rule, pay considerable attention to advertising and work with local media. Perhaps the provider will be interested in organizing free access to your newspaper, although now, in times of cheap unlimited, it is no longer so relevant.
Advice: try to publish reviews of the cost of services of local providers from time to time - this is interesting for readers and can help attract attention.
We have several large providers in the region, we cooperate with one of them, and the other expressed interest in cooperating with us. Almost everything depends on how and what you agree. Most likely, this cooperation will be mutually beneficial, although it will not give you anything beyond.
+ Audience quality
? The financial side of the issue
? Transition price
? Labor costs
? Site image
? Efficiency
I recommend to make a subscription [In] Contact. Advertise it on the site, call friends, etc. This can give a certain increase in attendance. You can try to make friends with popular regional groups and get some benefit from this.
On Twitter, the tape is also better done, because You will have no additional visitors at no cost. Not only, of course, but a certain part of the attendance is made up of precisely such trifles.
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
+ Site Image
= Efficiency
You can make a group yourself, but, as an option, you can not tie it on your newspaper, but make it just a city group. You will advertise for free there, publish links to interesting news. This requires labor, which may not pay off. If you have free time, desire and confidence in your abilities, then you can try. I will not cover the question of how to attract people to the group, since he did not do it himself.
Buying advertising on [V] Contact for the media does not make sense - too expensive and ineffective. As a matter of fact, I somehow didn’t like to advertise on [V] Contact, but maybe I’m just doing something wrong, or I’m advertising something wrong.
To the other social networks you can probably relate all of the above, but I would not waste time on them. Money - maybe. We have not tried, so I will not argue.
+ Audience quality
= Financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
- Labor costs // + for advertising
+ Site Image
? Efficiency
Everything is absolutely transparent, as it seems to me. In the forums visited, links to your site should appear where appropriate.
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
- Labor costs // + for advertising
? Site image
- Efficiency
There are systems that allow you to buy news traffic with reference to the region. You can spend money on it as much as you like. If they have money, you can try this way of attracting visitors to the site.
While I was writing this part, the only such service known to me has risen in price very much. It's a pity.
+ Audience quality
= Financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
= Efficiency
There are a lot of offers for Russian traffic, prices are about 2 cents for the transition. There is no big sense in this for the regional media. It would be possible to come up with some kind of landing page for such visitors with different jaundice, but I don’t see any practical sense in this.
- The quality of the audience
- The financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
= Efficiency
Like the Russian traffic, a rather useless thing for the development of a newspaper (the red price on the market day is 1 cent per switch). Of course, no one forbids buying it, but if you have 1,000 visitors per day, 900 of whom came from the link “Attention! Wielding a bloody maniac with an ax (details) ", then this can hardly be called a reason for pride. Although, if you are going to fool the trustful advertiser, the method is probably suitable. We mainly work with those who care about the result.
We tried for the sake of interest - the audience is passive, the number of views per person is 1.1. Refused.
- The quality of the audience
= Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
= Efficiency
Traffic exchange systems dozens. For some, as we have established empirically, Yandex translates the site into the category of adult, which is very, very bad. Besides, personally I am annoyed by all this dirty trick about the “tragedy in the family of a famous artist”. The target audience here, of course, does not smell.
To one of our competitors, this brings 5-10 percent of the total traffic. Taking into account their incomes, which are higher than ours by an order of magnitude, it looks weird - it would be possible to buy such a volume of traffic for 5 thousand a month.
I would recommend it only if there is not enough money at all, and visitors are much needed. True, if you don’t have any visitors on your site, it’s unlikely that you will benefit from these systems. If we place on the site informers, then, IMHO, it is better to do it for money and without fanaticism.
- The quality of the audience
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
- Efficiency
In principle, everything except Yandex is of little interest, and after hitting Yandex it will follow on itself.
Regular hit of a site in plots on Yandex. News is very important. Constantly see which of the scenes there are considered relevant to your region and make articles on those of them where you do not. Unfortunately, Yandex does not always connect the news to the storyline. I really like Yandex products, but the “News”, IMHO, is the height of inadequate. We can advise you to follow the advice of Yandex itself and, perhaps, make different headlines for readers and for unloading via RSS (“On horse and hat is burning” and “Horse has stolen oats from the factory canteen in the village of Kukuyev for five years, respectively).
As far as I understand, immediately submitting an application to Yandex is not worth it. There, applications are moderated, and everyone is not taken there. I can be wrong, because we were moderated the first time, but it was a considerable time after the opening of the site. (upd. stumbled upon a letter that completely blew out of memory - at first we were not missed because of the abundance of copy-paste).
We can say that Yandex.News for the newspaper - this is a must ! Because:
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
= Labor costs
+ Site Image
+ Efficiency
Expensive :(
We are thinking about various options for offline advertising, and, sooner or later, we will start to try it, but there is no concrete experience yet.
I would venture to suggest that:
+ Audience quality
- The financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
+ Labor costs
? Site image // Depends on how to advertise.
? Efficiency
Competitions are good. The problem is that the contest also needs to be advertised. Look for those who are willing to sponsor a contest for which your site would become a platform. I will write about competitions on the Internet sometime, because The topic is big and interesting.
- The quality of the audience // Not the fact that after the end of the competition, people will return to the site.
+ The financial side of the issue // If you find a sponsor, of course.
+ Transition price
- Labor costs
+ Site Image
? Efficiency
In the first place - Yandex. We account for 80% of search traffic. It seems to me that it is easy enough to achieve normal results even with a minimal set of knowledge in the field of SEO. Since The topic of search engine optimization is very big, and I’m not a guru in it, I’ll not go into details.
Due to various kinds of supplements to the newspaper, you can get to the first lines on requests that are not directly related to the news. About additions - in one of the following parts.
= Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
= Labor costs
= Site Image
+ Efficiency
We worked for some time with Yandex.Direct - the traffic turns out to be quite inexpensive (1-2 cents) and targeted.
You can try it at first, until you reach at least the top five for the most popular requests. We used it when, due to the traffic exchange system, the site was transferred to the category of adult. In part, this made it possible to compensate for lost search traffic. Perhaps it makes sense to buy low-frequency queries where you are not. Since there will most likely not be competitors, the price for a transition may be minimal (for Yandex - 1 cent).
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
= Site Image
- Efficiency
Once we are talking about Yandex, it is impossible not to recall this service. I will consider it solely as a source of attendance.
We, unlike competitors, are not there. The nearest of them accommodation there gives about 200 transitions per day. They, apparently, got there for a long time and for free, but our application has been “considered” for two years already. Is it worth paying for accommodation? If your citation index allows you to be among the first among all the sites in your region, then there is a sense. We do not even get on it on the first page.
? The quality of the audience
- The financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
+ Site Image
+ Efficiency // Only with a high citation index.
Since regional media topics - any local news, often there is a situation when a news can be interesting even for a narrow circle of people outside your region. Some of these news diverge on their own, but you can also “help” the information to find readers on your own. Look for themed resources and communities.
As an experiment, I recently posted a link to Habr, which, despite a slightly negative rating, gave over 150 transitions in the first day. Somehow the link to our site hit the main Habra and it gave something about 10 thousand clicks in the first 24 hours. Our modest channel could not stand it, so I had to redirect the transitions from Habr to the print version.
Beautiful numbers give entertainment resources. Recently, our competitors got one article to the main dirty, which gave them 6 thousand transitions.
People have a lot of interests, so when you see some unusual news, it may be absolutely good to find a place where she will have to go to court. This audience, for the most part, is useless for you, and the method itself is labor-intensive. But for free. At first, with free time, you can try.
- The quality of the audience
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
- Labor costs
+ Image of the site (if not spamming, but writing in the case)
= Efficiency
When I wrote this part of the article I was curious about what the “steam train” made, which once dragged us forward (for a long time the attendance was about 100 people a day). I tried to highlight key points. It turned out - Yandex: first search, then news and, finally, the widget.
The main thing in the pursuit of attendance is not to forget that only the project that is interesting to people can be visited. All of the above will be useless if the site does not differ from competitors.
Published parts:
Part 1. Where to start
Part 2. What should be ready
Part 3. Filling the site with news
The approximate content of the following parts:
Part 5. Income online media. Banners, articles, prices, possible customers.
Part 6. What can be attached to the Internet newspaper. Add-ons, etc.
At the same time, in large advertisers, press officers and marketing specialists report, as a rule, according to formal criteria - numbers are important for them. For small companies, the real state of affairs is important, which they assess subjectively.
I assume that the number on the counter is an indicator, not a goal.
')
Before you begin to consider specific methods of attracting visitors to the site, I want to note that since we are doing regional media, the project’s target audience is local residents. They regularly visit your site, advertisers are guided by them.
In practice, the share of local visitors on popular regional sites is about 55% per week. We have 65%, our closest competitors have 56%, and the leading media attendance has 43%. At the most visited site in the region - ... 3%. In the new rating li.ru all this is visible.
Let's get down to business.
Advice: for a few weeks after the opening, do not advertise at all, if only you do not have the money to arrange and promote any contest, action or something else related to the opening of the newspaper. The site should not be empty when people come there.
Placing an informer on popular regional sites
Obviously, your competitors (media and other sites that live with ad sales) are unlikely to want to advertise you even for money, so look for alternatives.
In our case, very successfully the owner of the most popular regional resource (torrent tracker) was my friend. We have placed a topline informer with him on a commercial basis. True, we did it, as a reference sloopoki, a year and a half after the discovery. In fact, we received high-quality regional traffic at 1 cent for the transition in the amount of about 500 transitions per day, which was very profitable. Now this tracker, unfortunately, is closed.
Thus, regional file sharing services may well become good partners.
I would like to especially note that it is the informer that is needed, preferably with one or several interesting news, because from a simple banner sense a lot less.
I will evaluate each of the methods according to some formal criteria. Explanations to “+” and “-” in brackets to the first method.
+ Quality of the audience (+ interested local audience, - occasional visitors)
- The financial side of the issue (+ the overall budget is moderate, - relatively large investments)
+ Transition price (+ cheap, - expensive)
+ Effort (+ a little, a lot)
? Site image // Depending on how and what you will advertise (+ positive or neutral, negative)
+ Efficiency (+ many visitors, - few visitors)
Yandex widget
Very good stuff, I recommend. Making a widget is simple, and there is a lot of benefit from it. There is no effort. You can make several widgets, offer them to the "regional program". Do not forget to advertise the widget on your site.
Our widget views more than 1,500 people every day. We can assume that if it were not for the widget, they would have gone to watch the latest news on the site, but this is not obvious.
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
+ Site Image
+ Efficiency
Cooperation with providers
As I said in one of the previous parts, 100% of customers of any local provider are your target audience. At the same time, providers, as a rule, pay considerable attention to advertising and work with local media. Perhaps the provider will be interested in organizing free access to your newspaper, although now, in times of cheap unlimited, it is no longer so relevant.
Advice: try to publish reviews of the cost of services of local providers from time to time - this is interesting for readers and can help attract attention.
We have several large providers in the region, we cooperate with one of them, and the other expressed interest in cooperating with us. Almost everything depends on how and what you agree. Most likely, this cooperation will be mutually beneficial, although it will not give you anything beyond.
+ Audience quality
? The financial side of the issue
? Transition price
? Labor costs
? Site image
? Efficiency
Subscribe to [V] Contact, Twitter feed
I recommend to make a subscription [In] Contact. Advertise it on the site, call friends, etc. This can give a certain increase in attendance. You can try to make friends with popular regional groups and get some benefit from this.
On Twitter, the tape is also better done, because You will have no additional visitors at no cost. Not only, of course, but a certain part of the attendance is made up of precisely such trifles.
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
+ Site Image
= Efficiency
Other ways to promote on [V] Contact and other social networks
You can make a group yourself, but, as an option, you can not tie it on your newspaper, but make it just a city group. You will advertise for free there, publish links to interesting news. This requires labor, which may not pay off. If you have free time, desire and confidence in your abilities, then you can try. I will not cover the question of how to attract people to the group, since he did not do it himself.
Buying advertising on [V] Contact for the media does not make sense - too expensive and ineffective. As a matter of fact, I somehow didn’t like to advertise on [V] Contact, but maybe I’m just doing something wrong, or I’m advertising something wrong.
To the other social networks you can probably relate all of the above, but I would not waste time on them. Money - maybe. We have not tried, so I will not argue.
+ Audience quality
= Financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
- Labor costs // + for advertising
+ Site Image
? Efficiency
Posting on local forums
Everything is absolutely transparent, as it seems to me. In the forums visited, links to your site should appear where appropriate.
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
- Labor costs // + for advertising
? Site image
- Efficiency
Buying traffic
Buying regional traffic
There are systems that allow you to buy news traffic with reference to the region. You can spend money on it as much as you like. If they have money, you can try this way of attracting visitors to the site.
While I was writing this part, the only such service known to me has risen in price very much. It's a pity.
+ Audience quality
= Financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
= Efficiency
Buying Russian traffic
There are a lot of offers for Russian traffic, prices are about 2 cents for the transition. There is no big sense in this for the regional media. It would be possible to come up with some kind of landing page for such visitors with different jaundice, but I don’t see any practical sense in this.
- The quality of the audience
- The financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
= Efficiency
Buying traffic without reference to the region
Like the Russian traffic, a rather useless thing for the development of a newspaper (the red price on the market day is 1 cent per switch). Of course, no one forbids buying it, but if you have 1,000 visitors per day, 900 of whom came from the link “Attention! Wielding a bloody maniac with an ax (details) ", then this can hardly be called a reason for pride. Although, if you are going to fool the trustful advertiser, the method is probably suitable. We mainly work with those who care about the result.
We tried for the sake of interest - the audience is passive, the number of views per person is 1.1. Refused.
- The quality of the audience
= Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
= Efficiency
Traffic exchange
Traffic exchange systems dozens. For some, as we have established empirically, Yandex translates the site into the category of adult, which is very, very bad. Besides, personally I am annoyed by all this dirty trick about the “tragedy in the family of a famous artist”. The target audience here, of course, does not smell.
To one of our competitors, this brings 5-10 percent of the total traffic. Taking into account their incomes, which are higher than ours by an order of magnitude, it looks weird - it would be possible to buy such a volume of traffic for 5 thousand a month.
I would recommend it only if there is not enough money at all, and visitors are much needed. True, if you don’t have any visitors on your site, it’s unlikely that you will benefit from these systems. If we place on the site informers, then, IMHO, it is better to do it for money and without fanaticism.
- The quality of the audience
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
- Site Image
- Efficiency
Yandex.News and news aggregators
In principle, everything except Yandex is of little interest, and after hitting Yandex it will follow on itself.
Regular hit of a site in plots on Yandex. News is very important. Constantly see which of the scenes there are considered relevant to your region and make articles on those of them where you do not. Unfortunately, Yandex does not always connect the news to the storyline. I really like Yandex products, but the “News”, IMHO, is the height of inadequate. We can advise you to follow the advice of Yandex itself and, perhaps, make different headlines for readers and for unloading via RSS (“On horse and hat is burning” and “Horse has stolen oats from the factory canteen in the village of Kukuyev for five years, respectively).
As far as I understand, immediately submitting an application to Yandex is not worth it. There, applications are moderated, and everyone is not taken there. I can be wrong, because we were moderated the first time, but it was a considerable time after the opening of the site. (upd. stumbled upon a letter that completely blew out of memory - at first we were not missed because of the abundance of copy-paste).
We can say that Yandex.News for the newspaper - this is a must ! Because:
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
= Labor costs
+ Site Image
+ Efficiency
Offline advertising
Expensive :(
We are thinking about various options for offline advertising, and, sooner or later, we will start to try it, but there is no concrete experience yet.
I would venture to suggest that:
+ Audience quality
- The financial side of the issue
- Conversion price
+ Labor costs
? Site image // Depends on how to advertise.
? Efficiency
Contests
Competitions are good. The problem is that the contest also needs to be advertised. Look for those who are willing to sponsor a contest for which your site would become a platform. I will write about competitions on the Internet sometime, because The topic is big and interesting.
- The quality of the audience // Not the fact that after the end of the competition, people will return to the site.
+ The financial side of the issue // If you find a sponsor, of course.
+ Transition price
- Labor costs
+ Site Image
? Efficiency
Promotion in search engines
In the first place - Yandex. We account for 80% of search traffic. It seems to me that it is easy enough to achieve normal results even with a minimal set of knowledge in the field of SEO. Since The topic of search engine optimization is very big, and I’m not a guru in it, I’ll not go into details.
Due to various kinds of supplements to the newspaper, you can get to the first lines on requests that are not directly related to the news. About additions - in one of the following parts.
= Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
= Labor costs
= Site Image
+ Efficiency
contextual advertising
We worked for some time with Yandex.Direct - the traffic turns out to be quite inexpensive (1-2 cents) and targeted.
You can try it at first, until you reach at least the top five for the most popular requests. We used it when, due to the traffic exchange system, the site was transferred to the category of adult. In part, this made it possible to compensate for lost search traffic. Perhaps it makes sense to buy low-frequency queries where you are not. Since there will most likely not be competitors, the price for a transition may be minimal (for Yandex - 1 cent).
+ Audience quality
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
= Site Image
- Efficiency
Yandex.Catalog
Once we are talking about Yandex, it is impossible not to recall this service. I will consider it solely as a source of attendance.
We, unlike competitors, are not there. The nearest of them accommodation there gives about 200 transitions per day. They, apparently, got there for a long time and for free, but our application has been “considered” for two years already. Is it worth paying for accommodation? If your citation index allows you to be among the first among all the sites in your region, then there is a sense. We do not even get on it on the first page.
? The quality of the audience
- The financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
+ Labor costs
+ Site Image
+ Efficiency // Only with a high citation index.
Publication of links on thematic sites
Since regional media topics - any local news, often there is a situation when a news can be interesting even for a narrow circle of people outside your region. Some of these news diverge on their own, but you can also “help” the information to find readers on your own. Look for themed resources and communities.
As an experiment, I recently posted a link to Habr, which, despite a slightly negative rating, gave over 150 transitions in the first day. Somehow the link to our site hit the main Habra and it gave something about 10 thousand clicks in the first 24 hours. Our modest channel could not stand it, so I had to redirect the transitions from Habr to the print version.
Beautiful numbers give entertainment resources. Recently, our competitors got one article to the main dirty, which gave them 6 thousand transitions.
People have a lot of interests, so when you see some unusual news, it may be absolutely good to find a place where she will have to go to court. This audience, for the most part, is useless for you, and the method itself is labor-intensive. But for free. At first, with free time, you can try.
- The quality of the audience
+ Financial side of the issue
+ Transition price
- Labor costs
+ Image of the site (if not spamming, but writing in the case)
= Efficiency
Eventually
When I wrote this part of the article I was curious about what the “steam train” made, which once dragged us forward (for a long time the attendance was about 100 people a day). I tried to highlight key points. It turned out - Yandex: first search, then news and, finally, the widget.
The main thing in the pursuit of attendance is not to forget that only the project that is interesting to people can be visited. All of the above will be useless if the site does not differ from competitors.
Published parts:
Part 1. Where to start
Part 2. What should be ready
Part 3. Filling the site with news
The approximate content of the following parts:
Part 5. Income online media. Banners, articles, prices, possible customers.
Part 6. What can be attached to the Internet newspaper. Add-ons, etc.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/288888/
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