Building audience

You work hard. You have great content. You have built it. But will they come? How can a news Web site use technology to build a bigger audience? MediaShift’s Mark Glaser offers these tips from the recent NewsTools2008 conference.

• Use social media buttons on your site, but also seed Digg with suggestions.
• Syndicate your content outside of your site. Get it out on RSS, widgets, badges — let people run headlines from your site on their site.
• If you do an audio or video podcast, break it up into 5 minute chunks, and you’ll get people to consume much more content.
• Include text descriptions of what’s in a video or audio piece.

Those are all good suggestions, but the last tip struck me as the best advice of all. Yes, it’s more work, but consider how much more useful and usable your site would be if you provided a road map to the content. Give the audience a reason to click “play” by letting them know (in brief) what they’ll get. Know any sites that do this well?

Advertisement