Treat the Internet as a unique medium with multiple platforms
Content delivery has constantly evolved over the centuries—and it is not going to stop now.
There was word of mouth and tall tales, then public forums, written word, moveable type, printing presses—all the way up to television and the Internet.
What has remained constant is that every new medium requires a new set of skills and strategies to be developed.
One example, provided at a pre-conference workshop yesterday at SIPA‘s 31st anniversary conference in Washington D.C., was pointed out by Mequoda Managing Director Don Nicholas. It was an eye opener.
Don hosted the “Usability Testing for Publishers” pre-conference workshop and recalled the days when television content was an experimental art, before everyone owned a TV.
Some narrow-minded directors, influenced by radio, started by creating films of men speaking into microphones in a studio. It was radio on TV.
Granted, that was exciting during the first days of television, Don pointed out, but the medium did not realize its full potential until some innovative directors added costumes, sets and actors to the screen.
The transition from print publishing to the Internet is no different.
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Posting magazine content on a website was great when the Internet first debuted, but now it’s like using your car as a cabinet—it can do much more than that.
Offering multiple digital products is the best way to optimize your publishing strategy online.
Start thinking about how you can use the Internet in new ways to deliver more value to your customers than a print magazine can. The medium enables you to deliver products in whatever form your customers’ prefer—and at a record low cost.
This publishing strategy is called multiplatform publishing. It enables you to deliver multiple products at minimal cost by:
- Breaking your content into small files of information, or minimal informational units
- Archiving those units
- Organizing them by topic and keyword for easy referencing
- Thinking of a topic that you have enough information on to create a new product without much additional content
- Aggregating a cluster of relevant units to produce the product
- Selling the product
You can use the same informational units to contribute to dozens of products using this strategy, further decreasing the already low cost of delivering content online.
Selling that product, however, requires an intricate strategic system and a well designed website. In our Internet Business Models & Strategies special report, we detail how to maximize your online revenue potential with websites that fit your business strategy. Inside you’ll learn how to drive more website traffic, increase conversions and organize your website network.
