Being a small or startup publishing company is hard. The digital advertising industry is broken. Larger companies like Vox and Buzzfeed are some of the only online publications that can hope to monetize their content effectively. Smaller niche publications often have an even harder time attracting return visitors or getting people outside of their current active users to see their content at all. Already at a disadvantage, most small publications are also understaffed and underfunded. These publications can use content marketing and search marketing concepts within their online distribution strategy to better reach their audiences and to compete with bigger publications.
Platforms as distributors
Somehow, platforms have long been both the saviors and the destroyers of the digital publishing industry. Regardless, they've become a necessary evil for the content distribution strategy of almost all online publishing companies. There's no real harm in trying out different ways to reach your audience, but don’t waste your time on a platform that isn’t growing your audience or enhancing its engagement. The usual contenders being Facebook and Twitter, there are a few more platforms that can be easily utilized towards helping you to reach your audience.
1. AMP
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project is a complex attempt by Google to make pages load faster on mobile devices, keep users on their platform, and to better engage with the publishing community. Many larger sites report a lot of success using AMP. Smaller publishers may be wary of trying out AMP on their sites, out of fear that it will further overwork their staff or that it requires an intense amount of web development knowledge. However, Google AMP is fairly simple to implement (more on how further down the page) if you're using WordPress or another common content management system.
Companies using WordPress will have an especially easy time adding AMP to the list of ways they distribute their content. Both WordPress and Yoast have plugins available to put (and manage) your content into the AMP format. Medium is also in the process of allowing its users an easy way to designate AMP content. Here are a few things to keep in mind before publishing your content via AMP:
- Make sure it’s in article format. AMP is meant for blog posts and news articles, so don't try to publish products or landing pages using Google AMP.
- Be conscious of the audience you're publishing for when using AMP. Articles that appear in the Google AMP carousel in the SERP are usually topical and considered “news.”
- If your site is struggling with speed issues, AMP could be a part (but not all) of the solution, as it will help your articles load more quickly on mobile devices.
- If your site doesn't use WordPress, implementing AMP might be a little bit harder than just downloading a plugin for your CMS. Find more out about that process here.
- Analytics tracking should be included in your overall traffic and segmented to show how much traffic comes from AMP. Find out more about AMP and Google Analytics here.
2. Medium
Medium is another platform that can help more users to see your content and stay on the page long enough to read it. Like any platform, hosting your entire site on Medium comes with the risk of giving your content to another entity rather than your own website. This is a concern because hosting all of your content somewhere like Medium means it could make changes to the platform that you may not like, or in severe situations shut down entirely (and take your content with it). It also has limited capabilities with on-page ads. However, there are some larger publishers that have been adopting Medium as their main source of content distribution. There are several benefits to doing this:
- Medium has a built-in audience of millions of engaged readers.
- Most of the content on Medium is high quality.
- Migrating your entire site to the Medium platform is actually relatively easy for both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. Be sure to keep in mind that hosting all of your content on a platform can be risky.
Another way to utilize Medium’s built-in audience is to republish your content onto the platform. Medium allows for its users to write content on their platform and then canonicalize to their own website (that's not on Medium). This allows small publishers to pick which content goes on Medium (much like a social media platform) in order to make sure it's targeted to Medium’s user-base.
3. Google News
Google News is a section of the search engine results page that focuses entirely on timely news content. In order for many websites to be featured in this specialized SERP, they have to go through the application process and get accepted into the Google News program. After acceptance, the site has to follow and keep a specific set of meta tags up-to-date, only posting timely content designated for the platform. Find out more about how to get accepted into Google News here.
Utilize content marketing tools
Outside of monetization, the number-one hurdle that most small publishing companies face is being understaffed and overworked. One way to remedy this is using tools that help diminish the workload involved in managing content-heavy sites. Here are a list of tools that can help small publishers cut down on their tasks:
1. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is editorial calendar software that minimizes time spent keeping track of all of the posts you want/need to do on any given day. It’s designed for both small and enterprise companies, but is better suited for smaller ones due to its all-in-one approach. CoSchedule allows you to plan your posts in advance and set a time for when to post them on social media platforms, all in a single tool.
2. BuzzSumo
Ideating different pieces of content for your site takes a significant amount of time. Utilizing a tool like BuzzSumo could help you to come up with a ton of different article concepts based on what’s trending on different social media platforms.
3. Canva
Having a small team usually means that your graphic designer is extremely busy (or nonexistent). Making quick graphics and supplementary images for your posts can totally be done utilizing Canva, without bogging down your graphics team with more work than it can handle (plus, there’s a free version).
Focus on your niche
Find your niche and build your audience. Obviously, this is easier said than done. But, it’s extremely important as a small publisher to be filling a void or taking a different perspective in the already overflowing content funnel of the Internet. Find your unique voice and the people that want to hear it. Sticking to your publication's brand or niche will in turn build you a specialized audience. This allows prospective advertisers to better target and then convert using your content.
Don’t always focus on quantity, but quality
Similar to the last point, in addition to not overstretching your genre, don’t overstretch your posting frequency. Rather than posting more times per day just to meet an imaginary quota, it’s better to create fewer posts of higher quality. Moz did a publishing experiment that illustrates the complexity of publishing frequency and content quality. Pay more attention to what your users want rather than what you assume Google does.
Summary
Being a small publishing company is hard. Most small publications find themselves understaffed and overworked trying to catch up with much larger companies.The best way to try to compete with larger publishing companies is to keep your focus small and to use external applications. They'll help you save time and make creating easier. Utilize all of the platforms that work for your audience — not just all of the platforms available.
Which programs have you used that have successfully helped your company create content?
How do you feel about putting your content into platforms?
I am using BuzzSumo, it is awesome for content writing..
Amazing Blog post!! I like medium.com and using it from last year. It is very great for blogging platform with Millions of active users it is one of the best platform for new bloggers.
You can also share your own publication on medium, their are huge number of publication are running on the medium with million of users. Some of them are Personal Growth, The Mission, Flip The Life, Free Stuff, I really like all post of them...
Thanks for the great post, Lydia! I love that there are great alternatives to AMP.
Question -- do you think AMP pages are here to stay? Or do you think they are going to phase out relatively soon and transition into something bigger and better? I've heard mixed things so I would love to get your opinion!
I think that platforms such as AMP have a place in the current structure of the digital publishing industry that is hard to replace. It's hard to say how long specifically AMP will stick around, but I think it's still even now just finding its place in the industry.
1. Categorisation of content. A lot of small publishers seem to create IAs/navigation that demands extensive content creation. Rather than categorising by product or service they categorise by location. The outcome is endless amounts of thin, similar or duplicated content.
2. A lot of small publishers don't target user need, but every user need; they don't try and meet market demand but every market demand. This isn't possible, and when they attempt to facilitate every demand quality plummets. The optimal strategy, as per your quality vs. quantity point, is to spend as much times as possible on the highest quality content creation (and then promote it - everywhere).
3. A lot of small publishers spend an inordinate amount of time on transactional content (which is more likely to be low traction/low volume). Customers spend far more time not being interested in purchasing than they do in purchasing mode, however this doesn't mean small publishers shouldn't try and put content in-front of them (quite the opposite). The best way to build a transactional audience is to deliver informational content (high volume, high traction) which will turn into brand awareness which will turn into transactions (when the customer is in buying mode).
Say, for example, they are a University portal, serving as an intermediary between prospective students and Universities. Rather than spending all their time developing transactional MBA content, they could focus on establishing 'league rankings' of Universities. It would serve the dual benefit for attracting publicity from the very audience they want to sell to.
4. While Google News is about the best mechanism around for bolstering brand awareness and attracting informational traffic, I can't help but think the demands would be too high for your average small publisher. The likely output to retain inclusion would be 2+ news items per day.
this is a great article I am very bullish on medium, we are just about to launch about new site and will definitely be publishing our blog on medium.
Also Co schedule sounds interesting I will definitely give that a look.
Thanks for the info
Thanks to you I never go to bed without reading something new interesting (:
Great tools Lydia, thank you!
I'm a big fan of Canva. I use it for every image to share on social media, and it's great and easy to do. I didn't know the other tools but I will take a look.
Lydia You have written a fantastic blog. You have described digital Publication in a very easy and better way. Content marketing has become very necessary to promote online business. content publishing is really important because only few people put the genuine content on internet, So its really important that we make the right content for your website or blog and also it will help to rank high on the search results for content discovery i used Quora , reditt, alltop etc
Great post. I wasn't aware that there were so many alternatives for AMP.
I knew about Google AMP, but wasn't quite sure how to use Medium and Google News. Thanks for sharing Lydia!
Hi Lydia!
In my opinion everything is harder for smaller businesses or startups for exponential growth. These tools can help people but can’t replace the work done by ten people. More employee means more brains to find out better solutions to skyrocket your business.
I have used CoSchedule several times and find it amazing. Canva has been linked with giant content publishing websites like Wordpress.
People should never compromise on quality. It’s the number one rule to succeed especially in content marketing. The content should resonate with the target audience.
Are there any other brilliant tools you can recommend for editing the content or making it more engaging? I would love to know.
Thanks again. :)
Grammarly and Hemmingway App are two of my favorites for editing. Thanks for this response!
Contém-se ok, o buzzsumo ajuda bastante em questão de verificar o que vale ou não a pena escrever, para que seja alcançado um suposto engajamento de conteudo
Great article!
Just to clarify, AMP is for more than just for articles and publishers - for example eBay are having success converting many product pages to AMP and with the list of AMP components growing (such as forms, lightboxes, carousels ) it'll become a much more multi-purpose technology.
Great and very helpful post. Everything is summarized quite well what busy agencies need to know about digital publishing. Thank you, Lydia!
I can't focus niche because my site has several products and articles. i read moz.com and many other site but i din't find good help about. may help me?
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Hey Lydia, Great post in today's ear content marketing has become one of the most important part of the Digital marketing and you just provide a great solution.
I have want to ask a question, How to enable Amazon banner ads in Google AMP articles?
Hello Lydia!
Thanks for your tips.
We will try to apply them and take them into account in our project.
A greeting.
Great article!
Just to clarify, AMP is for more than just for articles and publishers - for example eBay are having success converting many product pages to AMP and with the list of AMP components growing (such as forms, lightboxes, carousels ) it'll become a much more multi-purpose technology.
I also find G-docs very useful for content planning. It's kind of an old school style but works for me.
Awesome job Lydia. As a small digital publisher, I face these problems every day. I have been looking for alternatives like this to extend my reach. BuzzSumo is going to be my first project from your list. Do you have any hints on how to find complement the BuzzSumo results with additional data so that I can find trends my DA could rank in and would have some longevity?
I have implemented AMP on my website how can I check the growth on my website due to AMP.
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