So, you’re a biweekly or monthly publication, focusing on a niche market. You’ve got a good subscriber base, a good relationship with your advertisers… and a website you have no idea what to do with. Publishing your print content to your website every two or four weeks is a logical place to start, but updating so infrequently is bad news — it’s much harder to be a part of the online continuum when you only come to the party once a month, and people don’t read the Web like they read a print publication.

You’re used to the notion of a reader picking up your magazine, leafing through the pages, reading the articles that interest them and skimming the rest, then putting the magazine down, satisfied, and anticipating next month’s issue. The online pattern is completely different — a new reader probably came to you through a search, reads the article they came to see, and you either convert them to a subscriber or don’t, based on that one article. If you convert them to a subscriber, either via RSS or email or snail mail, then they’ll receive your new content, click on links from their RSS or email to read the few articles that interest them, and then forget about you completely until you send them more content.

So, perhaps you’re anxious to provide your readers with more content, not only to boost pageviews and satisfy your advertisers, but also to remain in the consciousness of your subscribers between issues of your publication. Your core competency is analysis and commentary — you don’t have the resources or inclination to cover breaking news, and your readers already have sources they trust for daily news. Here’s my mantra for the Web: if you can’t beat ‘em, link to ‘em.

Your most valuable assets as a niche publication are your reputation and editorial voice. You can leverage those assets on the Web with a strategy centered around editorial aggregation. On a daily basis, you’re reading countless news sources to gather resources and stay informed. There’s a lot of value in those links, especially to a busy reader interested in the news of the day filtered through the editorial voice he already trusts. Write a quick sentence or two about why this story is important, link to the story, and publish a post with a handful of these every day. Did the New York Times publish a story concerning a subject you covered in last month’s issue? Make that connection for your reader, link to both stories, and contrast the perspectives. (And certainly don’t be afraid to point out the mistakes.) There’s value to your reader there, and they’ll come back for it.

The front-and-center content on your website should be a blog that’s anchored by this editorial aggregation content. Once you have the hang of aggregation, make the most of your blogging platform and branch out into different kinds of posts — commentary, promotion, etc.

Aggregating this content doesn’t need to be a full-time job. Minor modifications to your editorial workflow will make this existing internal effort into an external product that will drive traffic to your website and maximize its potential.

For more, I encourage you to read these great articles on Eat Sleep Publish and New Media Bytes.

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I’ve worked with quite a few print publications on their efforts to establish and/or modernize their online presence, and the success stories have one thing in common: someone, one person, in the organization who has ownership of the website and wants to evangelize for it. For a larger print publication, this person usually sits at the VP level and has the authority and resources to implement their vision, and the tenacity to follow up and drive the team. But for a smaller shop, for a place with a lot of different things going on and a lot of different people doing a little bit of everything, it can be anyone willing to own the site and stand up for it.

Suffer through this analogy with me: buying a publishing platform and a Web strategy is like buying a plane. Skilled people design and build and customize the thing to your specifications, show you how the controls work, take the controls for a quick barrel roll to impress the hell out of you, and then pull out the pilot’s seat for you and walk away. Sure, they probably promise that “this plane flies itself, a child could do it,” which is probably true, but it glosses over the big detail: someone has to fly the plane to get anywhere. Some planes are easier to fly than others, but someone has to be at the controls.

Whenever I start a new project, I know right away if it’s going anywhere. If there’s one person who knows it’s going to be up to them to make sure the content keeps flowing, the user community is attended to, the metrics get more than a passing glance, and the website is a source of pride for the organization — they’ve got a fighting chance.

If, on the other hand, the conversation is about who’s going to do what chore to feed the website when we have a minute to spare during our real work, I know the plane isn’t getting off the ground. Planes have autopilots and good publishing platforms make effective use of automation, but planes still need pilots and websites still need web editors.

If you’ve got someone with the skills and the drive the own the website, fantastic. If you’ve got someone with the drive and the ability to learn the skills, that’ll work. You can teach someone how to work the controls, but you can’t teach someone how to be excited about it. But if you don’t have any of these people, hire someone from the start. It’s much more expensive to build a website that can’t get off the ground.

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In the quest to bring the old media into the new, and show editors and publishers how people use the Web to get what they need, this one is a relatively minor skirmish. Still, it can’t help but stick in the craw.

Publishers love getting traffic to their sites from search engines because it increases eyeballs, provides more opportunities to make ad impressions, more opportunities to get a newsletter subscription, upsell them to a premium subscription, and make money. Editors love getting traffic to their site from search engines because it boosts their ego. (I love editors, really.)

Optimizing the site for search engines has the pleasant side effect of optimizing both revenue and the ego, so professionals like me are called in to open our bag of tricks labelled “SEO.” And if you emptied that bag and tried to make sense of it, you’ll find that SEO is mostly about putting the key subjects, nouns, names, and other things that may be searched for in places that search engine spiders go to look for them. For the most part, that means the HTML <title> tag and the <h1> tags in the body.

For the editor that I had this discussion with, those tags are populated automatically by his publishing platform with the headline that he writes for the article. The trouble is, this editor is having a very hard time letting go of the creative headlines that he’s written his entire career to draw in readers of his print magazine, and he’s giving up eyeballs of people searching for what he’s writing for.

There are plenty of great articles on writing headlines aimed at search engine optimization, but whenever I bring it up, I don’t quite make the sale. He just doesn’t want to write for robots. I’m not a journalist — I’m an Internet professional. This is just the lay of the land, and some robots are benevolent.

So much of SEO is snake oil and hucksterism — once you follow some common sense best practices, the best thing you can do is produce content that people want to read and link to, and handle the one or two things in your control competently. One of those things is putting the darn keywords where the darn search engine can find them. But if you’d rather hang on to an artful headline, that’s what you’re missing out on.

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