You know your blog is good when you are highly blogged about
Newspaper Metro Sweden brokered a deal with bloggers last month in which it agreed to pay the owners of blogs listed on its Metrobloggen.se website that have at least 5000 page views a month, the equivalent of 20, preloaded onto a MasterCard card ready for future deposits.
Trend-watching business site Springwise.com says Metro Sweden, part of the international Metro conglomerate of free daily newspapers, has found a clever way to enter the digital realm and entice new readers.
“In doing so, they’re attracting dedicated bloggers and fleshing out the paper’s online content, allowing Metro to serve up more online ads,” Springwise says.
The strategy gives bloggers what they want: more publicity, and cash for their content.
According to the recently launched South African daily The Times, this is crucial to its vision of being the “first interactive newspaper” in SA.
Carly Ritz, multimedia editor at The Times, believes the future of successful news brands is in interactivity.
While The Times was being developed, Ritz visited the Washington Post to get ideas on how she could get readers involved online. It soon became clear that news brands around the world were tackling the same issue.
“The deputy multimedia editor agreed that incorporating bloggers into the brand, no matter what their views, was essential,” she says.
To do this, the Washington Post launched an interactive platform called Blog Round Up which features “the most blogged about” washingtonpost articles.
This encourages bloggers to talk about the articles, leading to increased exposure, and allows the paper to find out what content interests its readers.
The Times has its own answer to getting buy-in from online communities to launch paid-for blogging. Ritz says the paper pays five dedicated “blogumists” — bloggers who write weekly columns — at a standard industry rate. Each day the paper prints a new “blogumn” covering topics as diverse as motherhood and entrepreneurial opportunities.
This earns each blogger just under R3000 a month for doing pretty much what they would have done anyway.
Internationally, the trend is not just to link up with bloggers by supplying them with a little extra pocket money, but rather to buy them out. The New York Times recently hired 21-year-old Brian Stetler, who specialises in television commentary.
According to Mac Slocum, a new-media specialist in Wash- ington, it seems this sort of specialised writing is the greatest drawcard for bloggers.
The same rules apply for a blogger as for any freelance writer — tight copy, in-depth knowledge of the subject, and consistent, on time delivery will increase the chances of a media brand wanting your head on its totem poll.
“Generic blogging won’t attract the attention of media outlets. However, blogging about a specific trend, topic or industry can open the same door Stelter just walked through,” Slocum says on the Poynter Institute’s E media Tidbits site.
“Business folk are always looking for solutions and inside information. If you have a voracious interest in a mission-critical topic and can consistently deliver useful content, important people in important positions will (hopefully) take note,” he says.
Of course, as most bloggers know, it is not easy to get an audience in the first place, so those blogs that do get noticed by media brands probably already have a substantial following.
The question then becomes, why join mainstream media if you can carry on building your own brand?
Filthy lucre, of course. As ad spend moves online — last year UK advertisers spent £2bn online, just ahead of the £1,9bn spent on newspaper ads — bloggers are hoping that some will come their way. And as they become more business savvy, it becomes likely that their brands will become more valuable — after all, marketing is pretty much the same whether it is getting people to read your blog or buy your newspaper.
But, as many bloggers insist, not everyone wants to go mainstream and media brands will have to continue upping the ante to attract top talent.
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