Online Placements That Are The Hidden Gems

The Digital Divide On News Sites With E-Editions

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By Dorothy York, President and CEO of North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS)

You can increase your discoverability and SEO by being in, not only the digital section of the news sites, but also in the E-editions of the highly influential printed publications. Digital news sites, can have many more pages added at little extra cost, but the more pages added, the more difficult it is for readers to find a particular article, given a limited amount of time spent reading, which is usually less than 20 minutes. 

Printed newspapers, which usually have fewer pages than online publications, are often read cover to cover by multiple people reached, where they live, at their homes. Printed newspapers of about 10 to 20 pages, the average for weekly publications, tend to be in the home for a week, for all to see.  Printed publications can command higher ad rates for the equivalent amount of space online, because those cost more to produce in print and the likelihood of an article being read tends to be much higher in print.

Some of the content is only in print, not on the digital portion of the site. The E-edition placements are considered more valuable than the digital placements, because those include both the online only traffic, the print only traffic, and some people read both so you can more easily get attention for your message.

One business strategy that has helped newspapers has been to drop the subscription revenue in favor of offering free publications which can be mailed to everyone in local communities or posted online without a paywall.  By increasing their circulation, page views and their influencer status, publishers can achieve higher ad revenues.

Sometimes publishers have had to change their designation to “shopper” publications, which are defined as those that have a high percentage of ad content relative to news content. Shoppers, like the local Penny Saver, are sometimes the main newspaper of a niche market. Although less prestigious than major daily news publications, many have a huge following, get inserted, as special sections, into the folds of newspapers, and sometimes several different newspapers by different publishers.  Shoppers must be regarded as viable options for getting valuable, newsworthy, content placements.

Most editors of community shoppers don’t get as much content sent to them, so they are more receptive than those that get a barrage of hundreds of emails on a daily basis.  They are grateful for good, helpful information and relevant feature news that helps fill in between ads, to attract more readers, and keep eyes focused on the page, to drive more attention to adjacent ads.

There is no subscription required for shoppers and most can be found online. The challenge would be tracking online versions as e-editions which are PDFs, or a flip book, because those are usually not as easily searchable as a digital site. For print only versions, publishers may be willing to send those to you when they use the content, because you can’t subscribe to shoppers. 

There are several kinds of online placements, hidden gems, that you may not be able to monitor easily, because those are not as searchable on Google, or on the sites, as we would like those to be. Traffic for those is mainly from people living in the communities covered by those publications, that can’t find their local news anywhere else. They are looking there to follow the columnist influencers they like, find news of their local teams, local schools, local politics and other local news not found in major daily publications.

Here are several types of E-editions to look for:

1-E-editions of the printed publications as PDFs on sites like Issuu

2-online PDFs of the printed editions on publisher owned sites

3-Flip Books such as Flipsnack  or FlippingBook

 4-Special Sections of Newspapers, usually as pdfs

Here are several high circulation weekly publications that have only printed versions or E-editions, no digital sites for their publications:

1- The Papers Inc. 

2- Queens Times

3- Best Version Media

These are just a few of thousands more similar publications that offer opportunities for highly valuable additional exposure for our messages. 

While some communications professionals are sometimes too quick to dismiss some publications because of the time consuming effort necessary to reach out to those, develop relationships with the staff members, and get the placements necessary to justify the related expenses, others recognize the significant opportunities for added value that those represent. 

Our team spreads the cost of what we do over many stories to achieve economies of scale and offer cost-effective solutions to maximize ROI, helping communicators to do a more thorough job, especially for the message that management cares about most. Editors and publishers have trusted us, for decades, to send them quality content in the formats they require. 


For more information or a free proposal from our experts, contact us at info@napsnet.com or visit https://mynewstouse.com/ .