The need for a balance of traffic sources

As the Editor and Publisher of a small local news sites I wear a lot of hats.

The two that create the most conflicts are my hat as editor and my hat as ad salesperson.

Until I can hire a salesperson this is going to continue, and I’d like to focus on one of the stress points of these two roles.

As an editor and reporter, I was trained to evaluate the newsworthiness of stories by the following rote list of criteria: Impact, conflict, novelty, prominence, proximity, and timeliness.

Not all the criteria are met with every story. The “man bites dog” stories have novelty, but usually don’t have a great deal of impact (except for the dog, who’s unlikely to become a regular reader).

But as an ad salesperson, another thing I need to focus on is the channel/source/medium with which the reader arrives.

I explained a little about this here and here.

Some ads are highly visible on desktop computers (sidebar ads) but do poorly on mobile devices and are invisible on AMP pages.

Other ads will do well if a lot of readers visit the home page, but not if most readers go straight to articles via shared links.

What I did at 4 a.m. today

I know doing ad zone analysis at 4 a.m. on a Sunday seems pathetic, but hey!, that’s my life.

So this morning I downloaded a list of my available ad zones from the ad server company I use, Broadstreet.

My goal was to get a clear idea of what having my ad inventory filled would look like by plugging estimated monetary values into each available zone on a spreadsheet, and from there calculating how much I need to charge to arrive where I want to be in terms of profitability.

One thing became clear.

To credibly sell every ad zone for enough money to achieve the sort of growth I aim for, I have to diversify my sources of readership.

The enormous jump in readership I’ve gotten from the increase in Google AMP traffic is fantastic, and looks great on my media kit. But I need to be able to deliver results for advertisers who purchase on the home page, or category pages, or sidebars, or footers …. well, you get the idea.

So how do I accomplish this?

So far I’m just in the brainstorming phase of a solution, but a few things jump out at me:

• I need to increase my newsletter readership, and I probably need to increase publication frequency from weekly to at least three times per week. I only have 650 newsletter subscribers, which for a primary site that gets over 100,000 page views per month is very low. What newsletters do is allow me to control the traffic to some extent. Readers are arriving, not to an AMP page, but to the traditional pages via direct link.
• I need to refocus on traffic from social media, for the same reason as newsletter traffic. Also, If I increase social media traffic without decreasing the search engine traffic, my media kit looks even better.
• I need to provide some content that older readership, who are more likely to arrive via desktop computer, will read. Local history is an example of that.
• I need to directly appeal to readers to visit the home page often.

I’ll write more on this as I try things out over the next couple of weeks. I think the first step is doing a real campaign on newsletter signups, followed by trying to make my social media strategy more coherent.