If anyone’s getting withdrawal symptoms from the lack of their News of the World fix on Sundays, take heart. There’s a daily dose of trashy inanity readily available in your inbox or local bus.
As a selection of headlines from last week’s Metro shows, even the middle market media are trying gallantly to fill the NOTW’s shoes. Pretty soon, it’ll be as if the News of the Screws never left us…
There’s been a mini media storm over the Hong Kong policewoman whose “racy” pictures of her colleagues pointing guns at each other and larking about, student ball-style, in a Kowloon cop-shop were splashed over the Hong Kong press, and then everywhere else.
But have a look at the coverage – like here, on the BBC – and you’ll notice a telling omission: the URL of the blog that is supposed to have started all this.
Without the source, this is just hearsay – the media reporting on what other media are saying, based on no real evidence except some unattributed photos on a Chinese web site. Could this just be a media hoax?
More evidence of the shocking moral and ethical decline of the national tabloid press – now the Mail Online has let its standards slip and has embraced the grocer’s apostrophe*.
Apparently, Lindsay Lohan had her sights set on the Black Swan role that did for Natalie Portman. The Mail expresses surprise that “Lohan still thinks her acting chops are up to the standard of Oscar-winning actress’ such as Natalie Portman”.
Yes, confusion over the plural form of words ending in “s” or “ss” has finally reached that bastion of old-fashioned education values, the Mail. Looking forward to seeing reports of politicians being given “free reign” and newspapers being forced to “tow the line” soon.
Also, it’s lovely to see that, despite its lapse into modern punctuation, the Mail is still strictly enforcing its house style of calling female film stars “actresses”, when the luvvies switched to the gender-neutral “actor” years ago.
*Freelance Unbound house style is for a singular grocer’s apostrophe. Please refer all debate on this to Ranting Subs…
The News of the World phone hacking scandal won’t go away, so let’s add some verbiage to it.
Specifically – what’s the difference between scum-sucking, immoral, intrusive, vile tabloid (or other) journalism and illegal practices?
Fleet Street Blues posted an excellent dissection of the nuances of journalistic morality last week (I wish I’d written it). The crux of the matter is this:
There’s a clear distinction between what the general public is outraged at (harassing people who deserve our sympathy) and the crime (hacking into voicemails)
So – generally we, the people, are disgusted by the idea of a journalist knocking on the door of a murder victim’s family, but would probably cheer a hack hacking into Rupert Murdoch’s voicemail.
But the first is legal while the second, strictly speaking, is not. And the first, really, is part of the fabric of journalism, and has been for as long as we’ve had such a thing.
The confusion over this seems to be spilling out into the debate, even in the media. Here’s a critical look at tabloid journalism practices from the Shropshire Star, which got some play on Twitter last week.
In My encounter with the News of the World, Shropshire PR consultant Jools Payne takes issue with the idea that News of the World journalists have shaken off phone hacking and are now “decent, hard-working people”.
It’s a sobering and uncomfortable story. The girlfriend of her 17-year-old son was murdered – and Payne’s son Max was named on the girl’s Facebook page. As a result, the massed ranks of the tabloid press descended on her to try to photograph and interview Max. Cue days of pestering and wheedling, plus numerous attempts to “friend” Max on Facebook.
It was obviously unpleasant. But it wasn’t at any point, as far as the story tells it, illegal.
At one point Payne asks pointedly, “How had the press got my mobile number?”. But she’s a PR consultant – unless it was a private mobile phone, different from her work mobile, the number was probably accessible – legally – from many different sources.
The only real allusion to illegal behaviour is Payne’s comment: “I can’t help but wonder whether our phones were also hacked into at that time.”
But she offers no evidence at all for this. And mobile network operators started tightening up on voicemail hacking from about 2006, so it’s not very likely her phone would have been hacked 15 months ago.
Instead, Payne’s real problem is with journalism itself:
“The media’s insatiable quest for answers… hacks skulking in bushes in the school grounds and brazenly marching straight into his office demanding comments and answers with impunity.”
It’s perfectly understandable – this end of journalism is distasteful to many people – and pretty much anyone on the receiving end of it.
But it’s not illegal. And one can argue it’s not immoral – it’s simply the price we are obliged pay for a free media.
It’s also interesting to see the way that this article compares what happened in Shropshire to the current scandal. It talks about: “Reprehensible behaviour such as hacking into abducted teenager Milly Dowling’s mobile phone”
But that wasn’t “reprehensible behaviour”. It was a crime. The key debate we should be having is about legality in journalism. Straying from that into the ethics of journalism – or even the tastefulness of journalism – risks missing the point entirely. And putting the free media at risk.
When it comes to news, there are so many sources – the BBC, national news web sites, and stories from all around the world. How do you compete when you’re doing the same story? That’s what SEO – search engine optimisation – is all about. It also helps to be a bit sneaky…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkbqEqohavg
Keywords are crucial
Don’t forget to talk about what your site is actually about:
“You wouldn’t believe how many people you speak to who run web sites say ‘we’ve got a great web site, why aren’t we getting any hits? Why aren’t people coming to our site?’ You look at their content and they haven’t talked about what they do – they talk around it.”
If they’re talking about broadband, they don’t mention broadband. They have pages dedicated to it, but they’ll talk about the ‘internet’ or ‘modems – words that people don’t care about or search for. People who want broadband want ‘free broadband’ they want ‘cheap broadband’ and ‘laptops’. You have to do your research.
You have to appeal to Google first – then Google users. You need imagination – editorial skills must be on two levels.
You need SEO skills to appeal to the Google robot. You must use the right words so Google will rank you.
Then you have to appeal to the Googlers. Think of the tabloids – Sun v Mirror. Tabloid sales rely on good headlines and great images. Put them face to face on the newsstand and the lead headline and lead image will drive hundreds of thousands of sales.
“With the internet, every single story you do is like a tabloid front page on a newsstand. Every story on Google News is selling on its headline”
Take a major story from last year – the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. A search for the game title got a result of 360m pages for Modern Warfare 2. What chance do you have? You need to be timely – and to break your own news story (see Chris’s account of Broadband Genie’s take on the Modern Warfare 2 launch).
“Be clever, sneaky and cheat”
Broadband Genie covered the Mobile World Congress. How could it draw in readers? The site could have talked about “Mobile World Congress”, but it’s boring. It’s a dull subject. It’s also huge – the biggest comms conference in the world. So people who will search for “Mobile World Congress” are probably there already. Broadband Genie needed to target people who weren’t there but still might want to know about it.
Answer: write headlines to target potential reader interests:
Chris packed the headline ‘The’ must-have app for the iPhone to be launched at Mobile World Congress, with keywords:
“must-have” “app”, “iPhone” (then one of the biggest search terms on Google), and “launched” – another good search term
“If I’d written a blog saying ‘I’m at the Mobile World conference and having a lovely time’ no one would have searched for it. We did this instead, and got well over 1,000 hits in a day from people thnking this was a story about a must-have app.”
In the end, the story wasn’t really about that. Instead it was about getting hundreds of press releases about must-have releases at the event. The story drew in readers with a bit of a lie – but kept them with the promise that it might come true over the course of the event.
Too dishonest? What’s your view on enslaving journalism to keyword hell? Comment is free…
All sites need a constant supply or new, original, keyword-rich content. How can you achieve this without spending money?
In a talk to UCA journalism students, Chris Marling explains how user-generated content drove traffic to Broadband Genie last year.
How do you get unique content on your site for free?
Customer reviews
All you need do is ask visitors about their broadband – they’ll all say it in a different way. They’ll come to your site and talk about relevant things – the content will be the right content for Google.
Forums
“Forums are brilliant – forums are free.”
They don’t have to have a lot of participation, but the key is to keep it simple. Some of these forum items can get 700, 800, 1000, 1200 hits.
Example question: “Can I use Skype with mobile broadband?”
Broadband Genie does not touch much on Skype – it’s a free service so it’s not that useful to the site. But that forum statistic is valuable knowledge.
What do you do? Go away and create a page dedicated to Skype to draw those 1,200 customers in. Instead of a simple forum answer about a product that’s not relevant, hopefully that page can focus those people on what your site does.
The information is available in Broadband Genie editorial guides already – but question was about O2 specifically.
The question was asked in July 2009. That page is buried in the forum because it has not been answered for a while. You wouldn’t see the content appearing on the front page. But at the time of filming, Broadband genie was ranking higher than O2’s own site for a Google search on “O2 dongle top-up”.
This shows the value you can get from user-generated content. The site’s users have written a brilliantly keyword-rich story. It’s almost a year old, but still got 700 hits the month before.
In the fourth of a series of videos on SEO and content strategy, Broadband Genie editor Chris Marling talks to UCA journalism students about how the broadband comparison site pushed a news story to the top of Google’s search results, and used a well-tagged image to draw 1,500 visitors to the site in one month.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF85F1T8Kvg
Story case study: Government scheme – free laptops on benefits
As soon as the Broadband Genie editorial team noticed it, they got the story on the site very quickly.
“The beauty of speed on the internet is that Google News loves you to be quick. If you get a story up on your site very fast, you’ll rank straight away in the top three or four Google News stories.”
Site stats: March 2010 saw more than 1,000 hits on the story. The story ranked number 1 in Google search for “free laptops on benefits”. It also ranked well for “free laptops benefits” and anything to do with “kids disabled” – ranking it in the top 10. Even though the site hadn’t written that story as a draw for that audience, Google ranked it very highly.
“I don’t know if Google does it deliberately, but it tends to let one little site sit on its news list – so if you get up their quickly, you’ll be up their next to the BBC, Telegraph and Guardian. Some tech press story will stay in the top four. If you can get in quick enough and be relevant enough, that story can be yours and generate tens of thousands of hits.”
Story case study: Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2
Everyone was talking about Call of Duty online as the biggest online game ever – multi-platform and massive. But how could Broadband Genie get people to visit its site for that story? How did it make the story relevant to its audience?
The site took an editorial line of: “Broadband braces itself for Call of Duty” – the story was aimed at mums worried that it would break their internet if their son bought the game and 10 million people logged in at once.
Of course it wouldn’t have done – but the site could justify its need to tell people. Chris Marling approached talktalk, with 4m customers, and Virgin Media, with 3.5 million customers, to ask for a quote to reassure people it wouldn’t be a problem.
The story headlines are keyword-rich: “broadband” “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” (notice it’s the whole game title). Further down the story mentions “xBox”, “talktalk”, “Virgin Media” – these are all search terms that web users are looking for.
“We got 10,000 hits on the story because of that. And it’s a genuine story with information that people are looking for. We got real quotes from talktalk – but they were easy to generate with a 5-second email.”
The story went up in November 2009. It uses a screen shot of the game. It’s a legal, official screen shot, but when you normally see it on the web, the filename is a number – tagged 2165.jpg or something similar.
“All we did was tag it properly. We renamed it “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” and also added alt tags using the CMS, so Google would spot it.”
Six months later, Broadband Genie got 1,500 hits in one month from Google image search and the site was ranking on the front page of Google images for that picture.
Key lesson: Make sure you tag your images correctly.
Companies like Broadband Genie live or die by visitor clickthrough – the site needs to be found and visited all the time to make its money. In the third in a series of videos filmed last year at UCA Farnham, editor Chris Marling talks about the tricks he uses to beat big Google advertisers and win business with natural search.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kILudnhFJO0
When Broadband Genie started in 2003, no one else was specialising in broadband comparison, so the site would appear at the top of the rankings for search terms such as “broadband”, “mobile broadband” etc.
“But once the paid search guys came in, we were in trouble.”
Broadband Genie’s competitors had more budget, so they could just buy those results.
Around the same time, others had the same idea – unfortunately they had more money and were bigger, so Broadband Genie could not deal with them in the same way.
The company could not compete on Google paid advertising search – the sponsored links that come up at the top of your search results. Any company can go in and bid for a term (eg “broadband”)
Drop-off in Google search between number one result and number two is 50%.
Search ranking vs clickthrough (approximate)
“Once you’re down to number 5 or 6 on a search term, you’re not getting any visits. That’s your income halved, halved, halved.”
The alternative to paid search is natural search. Google algorithm respecting websites in certain ways. If they respect your site you’ll be higher up the rankings. You need to fill your site with relevant, unique content that Google will find and rank highly. No matter how much people are paying, they will only get the paid slot.
How did BBG approach this?
The company started with guides and one-click search terms.
What does this mean? Optimise a page to be completely focused on one term that people search for. This means you need to know your market.
EXAMPLE: Chris created a page for mobile deals with “free laptops” – at the time of filming, the page ranked 3 or 4 on Google. This is pretty good considering everybody in this market is trying to promote these deals – it’s a massive part of the market. Broadband Genie doesn’t spend a penny with Google getting itself ranked for this term, but is constantly in the top 3 or 4 results. In this case, its competitors are retailers, companies that make the laptops and come up with deals.
How can you do this?
Scroll down the page – all the top part of the page is trying to get you to buy something. At the bottom is loads more relevant content. “What is a free laptop deal?” – informative, tutorial information that all counts towards the Google result..
“You can’t copy stuff – you can’t cut and paste from other websites – Google will know. If you copy it, Google won’t give you credit for it.”
All content is written by journalists, but is keyword rich – you must get this right. Keywords often link through to other pages on the site.
If you have a popular search term in broadband, make a page for it.
“The key to success is unique, keyword-rich content.”
In the second in a series of videos filmed last year at UCA Farnham, Chris Marling talks about where broadband comparison site Broadband Genie’s traffic was coming from last year. In a word? Google.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1JGumGaB0g
Traffic patterns
“We talk about search engine optimization, but what we really mean is Google optimisation. You have to get Google right.”
News stories
So 25% is coming from elsewhere – social media: Twitter, Reddit, Digg, NewsNow. [Facebook wasn’t a key tool a year ago!]
“The traffic is coming from places you can get to very easily and disseminate information through with a tiny bit of effort. It’s really worth doing.”
If you’re creating a niche editorial site, you need to keep on top of communications technology. As soon as a new one appears – be it Facebook or Reddit – work out whether it will be worth using.
The beauty of all these technologies is they are free. All you have to pay for is your web space and your journalists – you’re not having to pay to disseminate information.
The key is to write good content that will draw in visitors to your site so you can monetise them.
Can you make money online through editorial content? In a series of videos filmed last year at UCA Farnham, Chris Marling explains how broadband comparison site Broadband Genie achieves £1 million in annual revenue through clever use of SEO and targeted consumer editorial content.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86zLGUemjs0
The Broadband Genie business model
The Broadband Genie web site makes all the profit for the company (it also has smaller sites, including Office Genie.
This doesn’t sound like a massive number – but it’s more than enough if you run your website properly.
“Overall annual revenue is projected to be £1m – there’s a lot of money available if you do the internet properly”
The model is referral-based advertising – visitors click through to links and a cookie is dropped on their computer; if a visitor buys anything from that site within 30 days, without going via anyone else’s referral link in the meantime, Broadband Genie gets the money.
These transactions can be anything from a tiny 3 dongle that might only generate £5 in affiliate fees to a big Sky package – buying all this online can generate £200-£300.
The beauty is Broadband Genie is not a retailer, so it doesn’t have to deal with customers direct.
“People see comparison sites like us as a kind of Carphone Warehouse – wide boys who try to sell you a phone because they know they’re going to get the most profit out of it. That’s not what we do – we send you through to the actual person. You’re not buying from us – you’re buying from, say, O2, and you get O2’s customer service.”
Income breakdown:
“When I started at BBG I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get those tenancies. I come from a B2B publishing company where you had an advertising team that was sitting there all day, every day phoning people up saying ‘the next magazine’s out in a month, do you want to buy an advert?’ and the response was ‘no’. They were ending up giving adverts away – selling them for £10 in a monthly magazine. We’ve got these guys ringing us up a month before their tenancy runs out wanting to renew.”
Google Adsense revenue comes from sponsored links. Clickthroughs on sponsored links get a tiny fraction of 1p in revenue – but when you’ve got them all over a very big website with a lot of content, that adds up.
Broadband Genie has same revenue model as other familiar comparison sites: Kelkoo, Compare the Market, Confused.com. But Broadband Genie does it with editorial, which makes it stand out.