If it’s good enough for Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of InterActiveCorp…

Diller: IAC `extremely lucky’ with split timing

Diller still wants to add to the pared-down IAC, though. In October, the company is planning to launch The Daily Beast, a news-aggregating site with editorial content. IAC’s partner on the project is Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker.

And Diller said the company is “extremely interested” in bringing in Web sites with structured content that can add to IAC’s search and local content stables.

This is the wager that Diller is making: bring in an established editor with her own “brand,” allow her to aggregate and comment on the stories from around the world that interest her, and folks will come back for it every day. If they do the little things right, Diller and Brown’s site will be a big part of the “continuum” very quickly.

Local content aggregation also has a great deal of potential for growth. Most searches are local in scope — where’s the closest pizza place, what time does the mall open, who can recommend a veterinarian — and advertisers are willing to pay a premium to reach an audience based on their geography. It’s the formula that makes sites like Gothamist so successful — valuable local aggregation and commentary builds the audience, and allows advertisers to target ads that are relevant and add even more value.

If you’re already running a site like this, now is the time to evaluate your strategy, shore up your SEO, and get ready to leverage these new opportunities. If you’re in a community that isn’t yet served by a site (or you think you can do better), now is the time to get started. Let me know how I can help.

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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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