MinnPost lessons on building traffic and reporting on the Web

The Nieman Lab has a fantastic post on Joel Kramer, the founder of MinnPost.com.

The parts that really stand out to me are the parts about building traffic and creating content on the Web. In general, Kramer recommends more, shorter posts. The days of piecing together several pieces of information into one summary may be over:

Even for our serious audience, we’ve learned that $600 spent on one long story produces a lot less traffic than $600 spent generating six to 12 shorter items. We still do longer stories every day, including many that combine in-depth reporting and analysis with personal voice.

But a careful reader of our site over the past year will note that we have a great many more short, quick hits, published all day long. So while we are spending less on news today than a year ago, our traffic has more than doubled during that time. On a three-month rolling average, we now have more than 200,000 unique monthly visitors and more than 700,000 page views — and in mid-February we enjoyed our first 31-day period with more than one million page views.

We are confident we can keep this number growing and keep quality high. Even short-form work can involve outstanding reporting and analysis — for evidence, check out David Brauer’s Braublog any day. But it does mean that we do a lot fewer ambitious investigative reports than I would like us to publish.

Tony Pierce gave us similar advice a few weeks ago. He recommends:

• He recommends posting more than once daily. If you post once a day or less, people usually don’t come to your site daily. They’ll just come once or twice a week to catch up. Not only do you want people coming to your site daily, you want them coming multiple times a day. Having someone come to your Web site twice daily is a big difference over twice weekly.
• Pierce also recommends group blogs, based around topics. Having multiple authors on one blog helps to ensure that there is a consistent stream of content. That consistent stream is vital to building traffic.

Kramer also talks about the delicate balance between generating page views and just producing content to get page views. Kramer and MinnPost.com seek to maximize page views by tracking what people like, while always keeping their mission in mind:

Google Analytics tells us exactly how many times each item we publish gets read. This has a powerful effect. It makes us want to do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn’t, while remaining true to our mission.

What does this mean? A glance at MinnPost lets a visitor know that it’s for serious newsreaders. Our brochure proudly declares, “NO Britney. NO Paris. NO Lindsay.” MinnPost is not a place to visit for stories about entertainment celebrities, or sex, crime, and advice for the lovelorn — even though we know that such content would bulk up our page views.

Back to Pierce for a second here. Pierce has a very simple formula for success:

Consistent content + links to the blog from other sources + SEO = increased page views.

I would combine that advice with what Kramer said, and you’ll be able to start building traffic in no time.

Daily Dose of social media: SEO FTW!

20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress — SEO is massively important on the Web. Many of you run sites and blogs with WordPress. Therefor, you need to read this post. The first plugin on the list, All in One SEO Pack, is a must for any WordPress user. This one blog post could help change the fate of your blog. Read it:

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPressWordPress reviews plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications — Okay, so not every one of these “essential” tools and applications is really relevant to journalists and content producers, but there are some real gems here:

• Tweetlater is a nice little app to schedule tweets in the future. This is great for group Twitter accounts where multiple employees are responsible for providing content. It’s also a nice way to ensure you spread out your tweets. It also allows you to keep your account active while you are away.
• Tweetbeep allows you to keep track of when people mention you, your company or other keywords that you want to track. This is great for journalists who want to be alerted every time certain words are mentioned on Twitter. This is also great for news orgs that want to track what people are saying about them. Yes, Tweetdeck can do the same things, albeit, without the alerts.
• StrawPoll asks different questions for polls each day, which is an interesting way to see what people think on Twitter. For journalists,  however, it’s much more helpful to be able to create their own polls. That’s where StrawPoll really shines.

Hands-on with IE 8: A giant step for Microsoft — Internet Explorer has finally become a decent browser. I know most people still use it, but IE7 and IE6 are categorically inferior browsers to Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, etc, etc.

For journalists, the most welcome new feature in IE8 sandboxing. This feature means that individual tabs crash, not the browser itself. This is an extremely useful feature for those of us who have a lot of tabs open at once.

Chrome also features sandboxing, and I expect most browsers will get this feature in the coming years. Essentially, sandboxing makes Web browsers much more similar to modern operating systems, in that they will crash a lot less. Yes, individual applications/tabs will still crash, but that’s a lot better than having your whole computer/Web browser crash.

Sandboxing will make IE users more productive because less time and knowledge will be lost to crashes. IE8 still has some major issues:

IE 8 does have more problems than mere JavaScript engine speeds. It scores a 20/100 on the Acid3 test, the lowest of the major browsers, and the installation process still requires a reboot. There’s no default “smart” location bar that many other browsers have, although you can search your history and most visited pages from it.

Check out this CNET video to learn more about it:

LJ World makes big push into beat blogging

The Lawrence-Journal World, often considered one of the most innovative U.S. newspapers, has made a company-wide to beat blog.

Many papers have at least a beat blog or two. Some have several but the LJ World is experimenting with beat blogs for a wide range of beats. One of the biggest reasons that the LJ World added beat blogs was because they wanted to tap into a broader network of sources.

“Clearly a community of 100,000 will know more than a newsroom of 50 ever will,” online editor Jonathan Kealing said.

One of the blogs that embodies that philosophy is Chad Lawhorn’s Town talk blog about the city of Lawrence, Kansas. The blog is billed as, “Blurbs and bites from newsmakers and your neighbor.” Kealing said it’s the kind of journalism that the LJ World could not do without a blog, especially in print.

Another successful beat blog is Heard on the Hill. This blog about Kansas University owes much of its success to its ability to harness the strengths of the Web.

“It’s short form,” Kealing said. “It’s videos. It’s giving people information in different ways.”

Alex Parker, an education reporter for the LJ World, recently launched a beat blog with fellow reporter Lindsey Slater called Schoolhouse talk. While Parker works for the LJ World, Slater works for a TV affiliate. The two bring different styles and strengths to the blog. 

“The idea was to have an alternative method of interacting with our community,” Parker said. ”Ultimately we want to use the blog as just another way to disseminate news. A way that is a little less formal, a way to link out to other sites, embed videos, link to documents.”

Parker is hoping to get more comments on his beat blog. He believes that will be a big part of the blog’s success or failings, and so far he isn’t satisfied with the amount of traffic to his blog or the amount of comments on it. Schoolhouse talk is only a few months old, and the jury is still out, but typically it takes at least several months for a beat blog to build a loyal base of readers. 

“It hasn’t become a destination for people yet,” Parker said. “We’re still trying to figure it out.”

Parker also reiterated Kealing’s thoughts on the crowd being wiser than them.

“You can bet your house that there are tons of people out there who know more about our beats than we do,” he said. “There is a whole wealth of information out there. We’re comfortable knowing that sometimes our audience does more than us.”

The LJ World hasn’t been beat blogging that long, but Kealing said they have learned several lessons.

1. Not every beat is as well suited to blogging as others — For Kealing, this doesn’t mean not trying blogging with certain beats, but it does mean having reasonable expectations for each beat. The crime beat is immensely popular, while the health beat is less so. The LJ World doesn’t expect those two beats to have the same amounts of traffic or comments. Still, this might mean that a beat blog won’t for some beats.
2. Timing is everything — I’ve mentioned this several times before on here. Kealing has noticed the same phenomenon. Basically, when big events happen, jump all over them. Cover them well. Nobody is looking for dated coverage, and beat blogging allows news organizations to be extremely current with information. Beat blogging also allows reporters to report more in-depth and link to important documents and other Web sites. 
3. Headlines are very important — SEO is a big part of this, but it goes deeper than that according to Kealing. ”That headline has to do a lot to draw people in,” he said. “A lot of times reporters are interested in over-arching headlines that don’t really say anything. You have to be pretty explicit, otherwise people are going to ignore it.” On the Web, being ignored is a death sentence. There are countless Web sites to grab users attention. Don’t give users a reason to go searching for something more interesting. The quality of a headline can be the difference between success or failure for a blog post. 

Why we switched from TypePad to WordPress

With the switch just about finished, I want to give you our reasons for switching platforms.

Both platforms have pros and cons, but ultimately WordPress made a lot more sense for what we wanted to do moving forward. Please be aware that we are using a WordPress.org installation, and we are not having WordPress.com host our blog. You can read more about the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com here.

• Design — It’s much easier to customize a WordPress installation than a TypePad account. Our old design was fine for our old mission, but we’re switching gears with the project and getting ready to launch a new feature and focus. If you know HTML and CSS, you can build any kind of design you want with WordPress. Plus, there are tons of themes for WordPress as well.
• Spam protection — TypePad’s spam protection was abysmal. A lot of really obvious spam got through and was on the site. Akismet, the spam plugin architecture for WordPress, is amazing and customizable. The amount of spam that makes it onto BeatBlogging.Org should drop dramatically.
• SEO — This wasn’t a huge consideration before we switched, but it should have been. The SEO of WordPress is much better for several reasons. One of the biggest reasons is because WordPress has a much better URL structure. Our search traffic is through the roof since the switch.
• Plugins — The plugin community with WordPress is another major reason why WordPress is such a strong platform choice. Some of the plugins we’ve installed help us track most popular posts (and then display the top 5 in the right column), backup the site, rebuild our sitemap after every post, provide spam protection, etc.
• Ease of use – Believe it or not, but I find WordPress much easier to use. If you know standards-based Web design and Web development, WordPress just makes sense. For people with little or no programming skills, TypePad may make more sense (although WordPress.com is another strong consideration). The TypePad platform is beginner friendly, but it can be maddeningly difficult to customize a site they way you want it. With WordPress, virtually anything is possible.
• Plays well with others — In addition to the built-in stat tracking, we use Google Analytics. It literally takes seconds to install Google Analytics on WordPress. Just find the footer file and paste the code in the appropriate spot. Now every page has stat tracking. TypePad is much more difficult. I had to convert our design to an advanced template and then install the code on multiple pages (there wasn’t a universal footer file). Since there wasn’t a universal footer file (per Web design standard practices), I had to read up on how to best install Google Analytics on TypePad.
• Navigation — There are so many ways to find content on the new BeatBlogging.Org. There is the current monthly archive by day, monthly archives for each month, categories and tags and a world-class search engine. Our old TypePad design didn’t even have a search engine, and it was hard to find old content using the site. WordPress themes tend to make more sense from a user interface perspective than TypePad’s.
• Price — Our TypePad account costs us $299 a year. WordPress.org software is free and open source. Our hosting costs us $50 a year. WordPress.com is free (there are premium features as well). TypePad is expensive for what you get.

Now, WordPress.org doesn’t make sense for everyone. You need your own Web hosting for a WordPress.org installation. You need to know how to install WordPress and set everything up properly.

Rest assured, if you’ve seen HTML and CSS before, WordPress.org is very easy to use and, yet, very powerful. The community around WordPress is a big reason why it’s such a strong platform choice. And many people find WordPress (.org and .com) to just be more intuitive than TypePad.

I’ll be looking into the differences between WordPress.com (hosted blogging like TypePad) and TypePad this week. Comparing WordPress.com and TypePad might be a fairer comparison, but every news organization should have someone around to customize a WordPress.org installation.