An easy way to publish and syndicate your best news articles on some of the big news and media websites
Web content is more plentiful that grains of sand on the beach. However, really good and newsworthy web content is much more scarce. The cyberspace audience is discerning, but it takes time to attract them, and you need sustained quality to hold their attention and to bring them back. Quality content is the obvious secret to long term success on the web.
Almost nobody pays for content. For a humorous take on this, see the recent Prickly City comics about Winslow, the coyote blogger. Winslow supposedly blogs for no compensation in the “Blog Gulag” on the huffingtonpost.com. Poor Winslow.
With blogging, you only get paid indirectly and usually the pay is paltry. You pick up revenue through advertising. Oddly enough, you get paid by those readers who want to click on ads and go away from you. However, most readers would not have shown up in the first place, if you had not developed a reputation for having something interesting to say.
Sadly, there really is no direct money in blogging content – however good the quality of your content might be. Blogging barriers to entry are nonexistent, and good writers are a penny a dozen.
(Apparently, no direct compensation is also the attitude of the major media conglomerates toward their professional writers from the Writers Guild of American. Please, media moguls, give the professional writers a fair shake on you republishing their work in new media. Put the real Jon Stewart and Dave Letterman back on the air! We’re dyin’ out here with reruns!)
Traditional news media and media center publications are moving to the web and they want quality editorial content.
Traditional news media have moved to the web with mixed results. If you look at the top 100 print newspapers, their web efforts get to looking pretty sad, before you get half-way down the list.
On-line newspaper editors want quality, but they figure that they already have local or syndicated columnists for most of their content and commentary. As a blogger, trying to talk your way onto a newspaper website as a matter subject expert is similar to getting yourself picked up as syndicated columnist. That path is time consuming and expensive to try, and current newspaper and magazine columnists have a very strong upper hand in the competition.
There are other ways for bloggers to get published on media and newspaper websites.
Newspapers are picking up web content through content consolidation companies that are blending the blogosphere with the web efforts of traditional media and newspapers. My blog articles get republished regularly through one such effort, BlogBurst.com BlogBurst screens established bloggers, and then they place bloggers’ real-time blog content onto multiple traditional media websites.
For example, when I publish good quality financial articles on my blog, these blog posts get picked up automatically via RSS by BlogBurst. Through an agreement, BlogBurst pushes my blog articles out to Reuters and to other newspaper and television websites.
Like Winslow, BlogBurst.com bloggers do not get paid, but they do get the benefit of broader awareness and traffic building. When your blog posts contain links back to your blog and/or your website, then you can get some real time traffic, if readers think that your content is interesting enough to come and find you. Through this method, I regularly get a very significant amount of back traffic.
Recently, for example, I published this article on my personal finance blog: “Why only one Warren Buffett? The illusion of superior professional mutual fund manager performance.” In this article, I included four links back to my website and blog including a link to a related article: “Where’s Waldo? – The illusion of superior professional mutual fund manager performance.” Because of the link traffic that I received back, I estimate that many hundreds of people probably read my “Why only one Warren Buffett?” article on various newspaper and TV websites. Only a minority of readers tend to follow links within articles. In this case, many dozens of readers clicked the embedded article links and showed up at The Skilled Investor website and blog.
So, if you have good quality and original content on your blog, and you have deep, high quality content to link back to, then I recommend that you sign up with BlogBurst. Certainly, not every blogger will pass the BlogBurst admissions test. However, if you regularly publish good quality information and news and you get accepted by BlogBurst, then BlogBurst will syndicate your work on traditional media center and newspaper websites at no further cost or effort on your part. With embedded syndicated article links, you can get back a substantial amount of regular traffic.
In closing, note one more thing. BlogBurst traffic does not provide you with any permanent links back to your website/blog. This is not a method to improve your Google Pagerank with permanent links from highly ranked newspapers. Instead, this is a method to build your interested readership over time. The newspaper and magazine business was also founded on an advertising revenue business model. Newspapers and magazines built their advertising revenue by building their readership. With good quality content and BlogBurst, you can too, and ad revenue will follow. It works for me.
P.S. It is sad to have to say this, however, with ethical standards on the web being a bit low… There are no business compensation arrangements of any kind between The Skilled Investor and BlogBurst.com. The Skilled Investor has signed up with BlogBurst.com, and BlogBurst republishes The Skilled Investor’s articles without compensation under their standard contract. No money has changed hands. BlogBurst.com has had no participation in writing this article and was not informed of its publication. The idea for this article grew out of a request on a Stanford Business School alumni email list that I responded to. Someone wanted to know how to help a client, who had lots of high quality web content, get published on newspaper websites. I responded with the substance of this article. Next, I rewrote and expanded my email response to become this article. …just another Winslow with something to say in the cyberspace blogger gulag.
