Today, the key resource in the online publishing world is target audience. To compete for fickle reader attention has become the challenge for established and upcoming bloggers or blogging platforms. They are finding that they not only need to create better content, but also have to work out a way to make people notice them. In this context, turnkey tools for optimum content distribution have acquired a great deal of importance.
Helping your readers discover content
Outbrain, quite a bit like Google Adwords for content, is a handy tool for publishers and bloggers to grow their reach and thus the business. If you publish quality and timely content, people are bound to come to your platform to check what you have put up. Not to be disturbed by a string of offers or proclamations to buy a product – mostly they wish to consume content. Keeping this in mind, Outbrain lets you make money by helping your readers discover content they are likely to enjoy.
Increased pageviews per session: The tool claims to achieve this in two different ways. First, it helps readers unravel more of your own content they might not have independently discovered, resulting in increased pageviews per session plus higher traffic. This helps bloggers and publishers to monetize through their existing channels.
Specific sponsored recommendations: Second, it lets them turn on specific sponsored recommendations: when you go for this, the tool will find relevant content for your visitors from external websites and display links in pertinent areas to them. And when they happen to click, you get paid. It’s a win-win situation as you offer your readers real value and earn more revenue as well.
Publishers and bloggers provide RSS feed of their text or they submit individual links. The tool generates headlines for stories at the bottom on media websites under the label ‘Related’ or ‘Sponsored’ posts. Publishers pay a fixed sum per click. According to Outbrain, the targeted traffic flow generates an impressive growth in pageviews per session as compared to search or social media referrals. Its network spans leading Web publishers like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Slate, Hearst, Mashable etc, it claims.
Tuning in to social signals
On the other hand, SimpleReach, currently in private beta, intends to help online publishers find and expose content, which will drive higher traffic through social networks. Its core product, The Slide, is so designed as to surface the most shared and also most likely ‘to be shared’ content in a publisher’s archives, allowing them to distribute their social content across platforms of other publishers. It aims to encourage users to share the same.
SimpleReach works on a premise that that social signals are increasingly getting important when it comes to deciding the content, which can drive higher traffic to publishers. A publisher to be successful must focus on leveraging social channels.
There are other automated tools for effective Web-based content distribution that we shall check in the next post.
