Digital Media Minute - Page 7 of 110 - The Intersection of Tech and Internet Marketing

If your website has a subscriber list–I assume you have a list!–there are two potential problems you’ll always be trying to sidestep, and themed newsletters might help you do so.

One is the challenge of keeping your content fresh and interesting enough to get your emails opened and hopefully engaged-with.

The other is simply coming up with topics for these emails without pulling your hair out.

Topical ‘pop-up’ themed newsletters can be a way to address both the challenges of content creation and engagement with your readers.

When Hurricane Irma came through Florida recently, USA Today used an interesting approach that turned out to be an unexpected win-win for both the newspapers and its readers.

This weather event was about to affect just about every resident of Florida and much of the Caribbean. Why not use the reporting its network of local teams were generating to send out a curated daily summary to newsletter subscribers?

They decided to try it, calling the temporary newsletter “Watching Hurricane Irma”.

Since USA Today has no doubt deeply segmented its list of 10.5 million subscribers and sends out 500 different newsletters each month(!), it wasn’t hard for them to focus on subscribers who’d be most interested in this particular series, i.e. mostly Florida residents.

In this case, they saw an open rate of over 50%.

95% of respondents to a survey conducted afterwards responded positively.

It’s interesting to me that most of those 500 newsletters I mentioned are currently are auto-generated. No doubt auto-generating a mix of already-written stories that should match the interests of given list segments is an easier way to organize and scale an effort like this, keeping costs low.

Part of what USA Today learned here however was that it was worth it to allocate a staff writer to create an original newsletter, using stories and raw information the local reporters were gathering.

Here are the takeaways I see for smaller publishers when it comes to themed newsletters:

Themed Newsletters For Smaller Publishers

As I said, this is as much a content generation strategy as it is a way to engage your readers.

No one ever said you have to restrict the amount of broadcast emails you send out, or that you can’t send a one-off email sequence over a few days (or, periodically) that is definitely not evergreen. Why not focus on timely content that comments on or weaves in a current news story?

As with website content, there’s a lot to be said for riding on the back of a topic that has built-in interest. Maybe there is an element of the story that would especially interest your subscribers, an angle that might not be covered by more general interest websites or news outlets?

You probably wouldn’t want to use a themed newsletter related to a natural disaster like Hurricane Irma to monetize–I sure wouldn’t–but your own commentary on a current event could have possibilities for new monetization.

Seems like testing themed newsletters might be worth a test.

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Google Search Results–What’s The Trick To Getting In?

I recently got a letter from a reader, saying in part:

…..it seems that I must not have set my site up quite correctly, as my post is still not coming up in any Google search results. I’ve tried everything I can think of (alt text for pics, keywords in the edit snippet bit). It says ‘SEO – good’ in the Yoast plugin) and I have the green bullets! I’m lost.

Anyway before I lose the will to live – is there any chance you can give me some advice on what I may have done wrong?

Ok, here’s a little secret.

If you have a question for me about tech, life, living in Bali (I’ve been in Bali for about 12 years, that’s true), or almost any other damn thing, if you’ll simply imply that your will to live is contingent on me getting you a good answer, you’ve probably found a way to compel me to answer.

So now you know. I’m putty in your hands. Up to a point anyway. I have my pride, or some that remains.

So here was my answer, outlining a powerhouse three-pronged approach, and I can only hope she gets into the search engine results pages (the “SERPs”) as fast as possible. And you do too, for that matter.

Are You In The SERPs Already? Do This

First, enter the URL of your site into the search field at Google.com, e.g. www.digitalmediaminute.com.

You should see your site, most likely as the first result. If it isn’t there then the site isn’t in the Google search results at all, i.e. Google’s index.

There are several things we can do to get a site into the index, or as we say, get the site “indexed”.

Here’s the first thing to check. You just want to make sure the noindex meta tag doesn’t exist in the homepage’s HTML code.

Sound complicated? In WordPress it’s dead simple.

(If you’re using a different Content Management System/CMS like Joomla, Dupal etc. there’s probably a way to in your dashboard.)

Look in Settings>Reading in your WordPress dashboard. The ‘Search Engine Visibility’ box as shown in the image below should be unchecked:

If the box is checked, uncheck it click “Save Changes” and do the steps below.

If it is unchecked then you can do the following. I’d do all three of these things:

1) The easiest thing is to use this link to submit your site to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

2) Also easy, and good practice: post a link or multiple links to your homepage in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.. New pages on the web are discovered by crawlers coming from other pages and sites, via links.

You can imagine that as important as social media is that crawlers are all over new posts on all the platforms. If they find your link they will follow it to your site and you’ll get indexed.

Caveat: For a new site this will probably take days, even if you do everything I’ll suggest. It could take weeks. Don’t get discouraged and IMPORTANTLY–don’t let it stop you from creating content. Your site will get indexed and you’ll be getting free, targeted search traffic from the SERPs. We just cannot know how fast Google will index it.

Also, you can certainly post links on social media to inner pages on your site. Do so. It is very good practice not just for SEO but to simply get the word out there about your content!

3) Signing up for Google Search Console ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ ) and verifying your site is also good practice if you’re serious about your site. Then, for new sites I submit a sitemap.

You can either use a WordPress plugin to create your sitemap, or I think the Yoast SEO plugin (which I recommend in my “How to start a blog” post and video) will help you create it.

Here’s the section in Google Search Console where you submit your sitemap. See the red button in the upper right?

After you submit your sitemap it can still take some time to have your site show up. Check using the method above; enter the URL into Google. As long as you have the box ticked in your WordPress settings as I show you above, the crawlers will find you eventually if you’ve submitted your site to Google, added it to Google Search Console, and submitted a sitemap.

Two more things:

a) This might be obvious, but determining that your site is in fact in the SERPs **doesn’t mean** you will be ranking well for the keywords you’d like to show up for. That’s a different challenge, the SEO challenge. For conveying deep SEO knowledge via lucid explanations, I recommend learning from this guy.

b) Making sure your homepage is in the Google search results is the first step, but you will want all the pages on your site to also be indexed in Google’s SERPs, naturally.

(By the way, I’m talking about Google because 80%–90% of your search traffic will come from Google. Luckily, getting indexed in Bing and other search engines simply involves getting crawled, which you will be sooner or later. Bing for example has an equivalent to Google’s Search Console. I have never submitted a site to it, fwiw. If your site gets into the Google SERPs it will get into the other search engines eventually too. We’re far more interested in Google because of the volume of search traffic it can send us.)

Back to indexing inner pages of your site.

We do not directly control how many of our pages are indexed. It’s Google’s index. But they do want to index your content. The most important thing is making sure your site is crawl-able by search engine robots.

Don’t worry, a standard WordPress installation leaves you in good shape for crawlability and basic SEO…the idea is that once the homepage is indexed the crawlers will look for links on the page to go deeper into your site.

This doesn’t mean you need to link to every post on your site from the home page(!). If you have several posts you will link to them all, in practice, but obviously with hundreds or thousands of posts this becomes impractical. Tags and categories help with all this but no need to overthink it in the beginning.

So the point: having a link to your sitemap on the homepage, even if it is way down out of the way in the footer, is enough to give the crawlers access to everything, making it more likely that all the content you’ve worked to produce ends up in the Google search results.

In closing I’ll say that just as sharing on social media helps your site’s initial indexing, it can only help to get your deep pages indexed too.

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Could Themed Newsletters Raise Your Email Open Rate?

Themed Newsletters For Smaller Publishers

Get In The Google Search Results ASAP–Three Reliable Ways

Google Search Results–What’s The Trick To Getting In?

Are You In The SERPs Already? Do This

Two more things: