Online Journalism Blog

Track all that you publish

Productivity is a key factor for managers when tracking a reporters’ ability to break news,  publish at a good rate, and gain an audience.

What to track:

• Total news stories per day
• News stories by topic or section
• Total blog posts per day
• Blog posts by specific blog
• Slide shows per week
• Video stories per week
• Podcasts or other audio stories
• News updates
• Breaking news e-mail alerts
• SMS or other mobile news alerts
• E-mail newsletters that are not sent automatically
• Twitter, Facebook or other social network posts
• User-generated content

A web-based spreadsheet is the best way to track all of these.

Track your audience

• Use web analytics software

Wed analytics: The software and mechanisms to track web site traffic

Identify key data points

• Pageviews
• Visits and unique visitors compared
• Engagement and referrers

Search engine optimization

• Spiders and robots
• Indexing
• Queries

Use SEO to grow your audience

• Content is king
• Linking is queen

Make sure your links make sense

• Title tags
• HTML meta tags

Make good headlines better

1. Keywords, keywords, keywords
2. Use conversational language
3. Don’t be afraid to inject a little attitude

Target specific social media distribution channels

• Blogs
• Flickr, YouTube, etc.
• Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Digg, reddit, Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.