Typically when a newspaper announces it will be cutting about nine percent of its staff and around 130 jobs in total, it would be another sad day for what some see as a dying industry.

But this is different.

By morphing from a print-centric newspaper company to a multi-platform media company, the USA Today may just be revealing a blueprint for the rest of the media world to follow to economic viability in this changing world of news consumption, with unfortunately some loyal employees shed along the way.

The old way wasn’t working. Ad revenue for the USA Today declined by 29 percent in 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal, and then by another 11 percent in the first quarter this year. The number of ad pages in the paper declined by 3.7 percent in the second quarter.

The paper’s circulation has been dropping as well, declining by about 500,000 subscribers in the past three years, according to NPR.

However, according to an internal slide show presented to USA Today employees, USAToday.com is seeing continued growth with a 15 percent increase in unique visitors since the start of 2010; mobile downloads, meanwhile, are up by 2.2 million and 71 percent in 2010.

So instead of mourning the loss of subscribers and print advertising revenue, USA Today has decided to make a full throttle push at beefing up its online and mobile editions, a path that many media companies may follow if it proves successful.

“This is pretty radical,” USA Today publisher Dave Hunke told The Associated Press. “This gets us ready for our next quarter century.”

The aforementioned slide show beings with the old W. Edwards Deming quote, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” And so it is in the newspaper industry today.

According to the slide show, the paper also aims to go from being protective of its turf to readily sharing resources, from a limited view of metrics to a keen awareness of metrics and from innovative on occasion to organized for innovation. In each way, the paper is transforming from the old-school newspaper view to the new-school digital-based view.

Along the way, the paper has adjusted its hierarchy from a traditional newspaper setting with separate desk editors to a unit divided into 13 content rings.

The irony of the newspaper crisis of the past few years has always been that although fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers, more and more people are consuming media; they’re just doing it in a different format. Whereas the local paper as well as national papers such as the USA Today used to be a staple for many families, people are now consuming their media online and on the go via mobile apps.

If USA Today and other media organizations are going to survive, they need to be efficient with their resources and focus them in the areas that will attract the most eyeballs and, ultimately, the most revenue. It does not take the sophisticated analysis that the USA Today did of the market to determine that those resources should be shifted from the print side to mobile and web content development while putting more of a focus on packages that play well in those mediums.

Gannett has been known to be very formulaic across the many news organizations it owns, so I have to think that this is only the beginning. Here locally in Arizona we have seen The Arizona Republic, another Gannett paper, place an increased emphasis on optimizing its articles for the search engines, and I would not be surprised to see the newsrooms of papers like The Republic re-organized in what Gannett sees as being a more profitable way.

The past few years the big question in the journalism industry has been, “How can we survive?” On that count, it remains to be seen if the digital and mobile markets can replace the revenue that has been lost and will continue to be lost in print.

But USA Today understood it was fighting a battle it could not win by attacking the daily news cycle in a traditional print-centric way, so adapting to the times by focusing on online and mobile could be the only way for it to survive.

Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz is an Internet marketing strategist at Vertical Measures as well as an accomplished reporter, blogger and editor. He covers the link building beat.

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A little over a month ago, Vertical Measures created a fun SEO infographic about the types of links you can obtain through link building and the value of each types of links.

As a follow up, I thought I would go through the link types represented in this visualization and share which ones we actually received while doing some website marketing for this infographic.

1. Content Distribution

One of the first steps in any good content distribution strategy is getting a few quality press releases and articles written with SEO optimized text pointing back to your content. This helps you get your content out there and hopefully syndicated.

2. Blog / Forum Comments

Blog comments are a particular favorite of mine. One of the ways to promote a new post or article on your site is through commenting on blogs that are CommentLuv enabled.

Comment on related post about a Google Infographic.

Now getting a link to your content in your comment is great, but what is even better is when someone notices your content and goes one step further and writes a whole blog posts on it, which “upgrades” your link, if you will, from a blog comment to an in-content natural link. This is what happened when I commented on a post about an infographic on life in the cloud, which resulted in a post on link data visualization.

3. Purchased Links

According to SEOMoz, paid links aren’t all that bad. But did we purchase any for our infographic? We didn’t outright ask anyone, “Hey, if you link to this, I’ll give you $50.” Nor did we buy any directory links for our infographic.

4. Reciprocating Links

Reciprocal links are another type that we did not touch on for our infographic. One way we could have done this in a relevant fashion would be to ask someone else with a search related infographic to post ours on their blog and, in return, we would post theirs on our blog. So needless to say, not all reciprocal links are a bad thing. You just have to be careful that they are highly, highly relevant.

5. Social Media / Bookmarks

Social media promotion was probably the strongest form of promotion we did for our infographic. We received a lot of traffic from Twitter and Facebook by encouraging tweets with the incorporation of the Tweetmeme button and likes with the Facebook Like Button code, as well as from bookmarking on social voting sites like Sphinn, StumbleUpon, and BizSugar.

6. Embedded Content

One of the best things about infographics is that people want to embed them on their site. In our case, our infographic was interactive, so we created the embed code that people could put in the image and it would link to our site for the animated version.

<a title="Linktoberfest!" href="http://www.verticalmeasures.com/linktoberfest/" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.verticalmeasures.com/linktoberfest/images/linktoberfest.jpg" border="0"
alt="Linktoberfest! SEO Infographic for Link Data Visualization" /></a>

This code was used to feature our infographic in several blog posts, including 12 Kickass SEO Infographics, Links are Like Beers, and SEO Infographic for Link Data Visualization.

7. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation was one that we didn’t touch on for this content. But again, if we wanted to, we could seek out opportunities where people have linked out to infographics that no longer exist and ask if they would like to replace their missing infographic with ours. It takes a bit of research to find these types of opportunities, but webmasters are often quite appreciative of anyone helping them better their website by replacing broken links and content.

8. Natural Links

Natural links are the holy grail of link building. Once you create link worthy content, the kind of links you want the most are the ones that you don’t have to do any more work for. You want to create content that works for you – content that is just that good to warrant people happily linking to it without you having to even ask, such as the ones we received from link building roundups and best of the week posts.

9. Link Requests

Some of the highest quality links come from link requests. Although natural links are the best, sometimes you have to give your content a nudge to get it on a relevant site to increase exposure and rankings.

For infographics, the best places to start for link requests are on sites that showcase infographics, such as Infographics Showcase who featured our infographic after we suggested it to their site. This highlights the key to any link request – you want to make that the link (or content) you are requesting to put on another site is very relevant and valuable to them. This will ensure that you receive a better response rate to your requests.

Results of Link Worth Content

Now what were the results of our web content development project? Our infographic is now in the top 5 results of Google for seo infographic, and the top 1-2 results for link data visualization and link building infographic. We also received leads for our link building services via the infographic. And last, but not least, we have something that easily explains link quality that we can share with anyone who asks, including potential clients! All in all, a great reason to develop link worthy content!

Your Best Content

When you create content that you hope to go viral, what type do you create and how do you promote it? What kind of benefits and results have you seen from awesome content going viral?

Kristi Hines

Kristi Hines is a Web Strategist and author of the Vertical Measure’s Guide Blogging for Business.

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Have you heard? This month, I’ll be presenting the Vertical Measures Webinar! Join us for “Protect Your Online Reputation While You Still Can!,” on September 9 at 11:30 a.m. EST (8:30 a.m. PST, 10:30 a.m. CST) where I’ll discuss the need for and ways to protect your good online name. In preparation for my big day, I took some time out to talk to some folks in the field that I respect and whom have helped shape by approach to Online Reputation Management. I started off with David Wallace, the co-founder and CEO of SearchRank. He is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Also, David is a strong proponent for practicing ethical search engine marketing techniques and pro-active online reputation management.

Elise Redlin-Cook: What do you think is the best way to audit your online reputation?

David Wallace: The best tool I’ve come across in my online reputation management duties is Trackur. Trackur is a subscription based online reputation & social media monitoring tool designed to assist in tracking what is said about you or your company on the internet. The tool scans hundreds of millions of web pages, including news, blogs, video, images, and forums, and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords you put into it.

Of course if you want something simple and even free, Google Alerts is also a free way to have email updates sent to you of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Elise: What’s the best way to prevent reputation crises?

David: Be proactive and take control of the SERPs (search engine results pages) before you have a problem. There are several ways to accomplish this. First and foremost, make sure you have a corporate web site that includes your brand and even trade names for which you wish to protect the reputation of. A corporate blog is also a must, not only with regards to online reputation but also as a way to get out information and interact with your community.

That should allow you to control the first and second set of search results but what about listings 3 – 30 and even beyond?

We have found that setting up profiles at popular social media sites works very well to “control” what the SERPs say about you (more about that later). You can also hire bloggers to write reviews about your company or even your products and/or services. With this technique, make sure the blogger lists the brand or trade name you wish to protect in the title of the post. If you can get a Wikipedia page for your company, that would be huge as Wikipedia pages rank very well for brand names.

The main idea is to have a variety of sites/pages besides your main corporate site that somehow represent your company in a positive or even neutral manner.

Elise: Great advice! So, how about if a reputation crisis does arise, where should one start?

David: I think you should start at the source. Most reputation management problems are caused by a single person. One should ask if there is any merit to the negativity. Can it be resolved with the individual who started the crisis?

There was a scenario a few years ago where I myself caused a company to have a negative online reputation by a blog post I wrote. I was simply relating the horrible experience I had with their shoddy craftsmanship and poor customer service. Once they discovered the post, which ranked number one for their brand name, the owner contacted me and worked to resolve the reason why I was upset in the first place. The post went away and their online reputation problem was solved.

So, I’d say start with the cause of the problem first and if it cannot be resolved that way, then take steps to either get the negative results removed (in cases of liable, slander, etc.) or push them down the results so they are not found on at least the first three pages of results.

Elise: What are some of the mistakes small business owners are making in terms of not fully protecting themselves or keeping tabs on what’s going on with their reputation?

David: They simply aren’t paying attention. They also underestimate the power today’s consumers have. With blogs and review sites such as Yelp, consumers have a lot of power to either do good or harm to a company. Whereas bad experiences were typically shared with 10 – 20 people in pre-UGC (user generated content) days, now a single blog post can be broadcasted to millions.

No matter how small a business is, they should be paying attention to what is being said about them online and take steps to not only have some control over the conversation but also be able to engage those who might have a negative image of the business.

Elise: It is suggested that if a company website has a negative result directly below it then up to 70% of surfers will click on the negative result first rather than the company website. Do you think this is true?

David: Absolutely! Even though most won’t admit it, we like negativity. Why are most of the local news stories negative in nature? It’s not just due to the fact that there is a lot of bad stuff going on but also because people feed on negative news. We love the scandal. In light of this, it is not hard to believe that most searchers will click on the negative results rather than the company’s web site.

Elise: Well, that certainly makes sense. So, what are some of the most common ways individuals or organizations come under attack?

David: It is true that you cannot make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time. However in most cases where an online reputation management problem occurs, the company did something (or didn’t do something) that really made the consumer upset, upset enough to take the time to write a blog post or file a negative review somewhere. Poor customer service, cheap products, sub-par service and or just not caring whether the customer is satisfied or not are all reasons why consumers get upset.

Of course there are the mentally unstable and even those who simply wish to do harm to a company because they can. Oh and the online extortionist… not mentioning any names here but if you been involved in any negative online reputation cases, you know who I’m talking about.

Elise: You’ve suggested creation of social media profiles for use in this endeavor. How do you use social media for online reputation management?

David: Sites like Facebook, Twiteer, LinkedIn and many others will allow you to set up profiles in which you can list your brand or trade name as the user name, have a custom URL, include info about your company, and in most cases create link or links back to your site.

The key is to set these up properly and then make sure they are indexed so they will actually show up in the results. Some social media sites allow you to link to other social media profiles which helps in the process of getting all these profiles indexed and present in the SERPs when your brand(s) or trade name(s) are searched for.

Elise: What are some tools and/or reading materials do you recommend on this topic?

David: Tools to monitor online reputation include Google Alerts, Trackur, Reputation Defender, BrandsEye, Radian6 and Twitter-specific - TweetDeck, Sideline, and Monitter. These are just a few of many tools now available to monitor online reputation.

As for reading, I wrote a post earlier this year entitled “Getting Proactive With Online Reputation Management” that may provide some insightful steps and techniques one can take to take control of their online reputations.

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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So you have an e-commerce site and you sell stuff online.  Great, people go to your site and buy products or services.  Does your relationship with your customers have to end there?  Certainly not.  If your site boasts entertaining, trendy and helpful information, they will keep coming back for more.  Maybe they will also tell all their friends and family how fun and useful your site is.  Now you’re cookin’!

Organic gardening and organic traffic are hot topics right now.  We hear about gardens popping up all over the place, including the White House, and how important it is that they are free of chemicals; in other words, organic.  Traffic to your site that is organic is a good thing as this traffic comes to you from search engines because of the great information, okay—content, you provide on your site.

Cultivation

You could think of your visitors as seeds that end up on your site, or your garden.  You can leave the seeds there to fend for themselves, or you can cultivate them.  Let’s say you choose the latter.  There are a few things that these seeds need in order to germinate and grow into plants, err, customers, and repeat visitors.

Water

H20 is a necessity for those little seeds (visitors).  In order for a visitor to become a customer, your site needs to have detailed product or service descriptions.  In relationship to a brick and mortar store, your site is at a disadvantage because your products can’t be handled or tried on.  A visitor needs to get a good overall feel for a product through enticing product descriptions that include all pertinent information such as color, size, function and features.

Sunshine

Plants need sunshine to grow and stay alive through the photosynthesis process.  Visitors could use a dose of humor and entertainment for the nonbouncesynthesis process.  In other words, keep visitors on your site with relevant trivia, quotes, funny videos, silly stories, games, amazing photos, contests, jokes, spoofs and cartoons.  You could even do something highly unique and trendy like Barney’s New York by formatting their website to be seen in 3D and even offering up the 3D glasses.  This kind of content not only makes your visitors giggle, but it serves to humanize your company.  Just make sure it’s presented tastefully and will not offend.

Fertilizer

In order for plants to really flourish, they need some fertilizer.  For your visitors, this means resources.  Wouldn’t it be great if your visitors thought of your site as an encyclopedia of relevant niche information?  They would bookmark it and keep coming back with excitement to see what you’ve posted next.  This means spending some time on web content development and most certainly implementing a blog and keeping it active.  Here are some resource ideas to get you started (they should be relevant to your niche or industry):

• Answers or solutions to common problems
• Current trends or events (highlighting upcoming local/community events is great)
• Product reviews
• Success stories
• Interviews (with customers, industry leaders or your staff)
• User guides and how-to/tutorials (downloadable or video)
• Lists (most popular, best, worst, ways to, outside resources)
• Side subjects (if you sell culinary type items, provide recipes)
• Histories or “behind the scenes”
• Share statistics (infographics are sizzling right now)
• Best practices
• Finished projects with pictures (if you sell jewelry supplies, show a completed necklace with a listing of the products used; have customers send in photos of projects they’ve made or outfits they’ve put together, etc.)
• In the news (items that have been featured in the news recently)
• Upcoming products or services (sneak preview of good things to come)
• Forum (provide a place for your visitors/clients to ask questions and share information)

You know you’ve always wanted to do some gardening; there’s a little green thumb in all of us.  So, go put on your overalls, grab a rake and get to it!  Cultivate some organic traffic by being a great resource.

Ardala Evans

Ardala is a Project Manager working with the client Services Team at Vertical Measures. She supervises the completion of the monthly tasks for the clients. She also works directly with clients to provide reporting on their projects and ranking reviews.

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Continuing my blog posts on using Google Analytics to make your online marketing measurable, the topic of measuring the actual performance of the website content itself can be much harder to calculate. After all there may be any number of reasons why you have content on your site. It may be there to inform and educate customers to reduce your customer service costs. It might also be that the content is there for the whole purpose of link building, to attract links and increase the authority of your website and improve the rankings of other pages for targeted keywords.

However, for the purpose of this article, we are going to assume that the content on the page is for the sole purpose of persuading visitors to perform the goal of your website, be that to sell products, receive emails enquiring about your products, or subscribe to your service. However, even this isn’t simple or obvious to calculate. For example, a website visitor might read 5 pages of your website and then subscribe to your emails, but which piece of content persuaded them to do so? The first page, the last page, or all of them equally?

While you may never know the answers to some of these questions, the information available to you in Google Analytics can certainly help in understanding how visitors use your website content to fulfill your websites goals. I have covered setting up goals in analytics before, so I won’t do that again here, but it is crucial that you not only set these up correctly, but give them a monetary value. Not only does this help for measuring content performance, but also for understanding the value of everything you do, from traffic sources, keywords etc.

There are a number of reports in the Content section of Google Analytics, which show some standard metrics like the top landing and exit pages, as well as breaking down the content by URL, Title, or the most popular subdirectories. Again, the purpose of this post is not to outline each of these individually, as it is pretty intuitive.

However, the ‘Top Content’ report is the one that I primarily use to see the performance of each individual page. This reports the normal information of time on site, page views, bounce rate etc, but the metric we are most interested in for the purpose of Goal performance is the $ Index;

$ Index is explained well in the Analytics Conversion University but is essentially a way of ranking pages (high numbers are good), although the numbers themselves don’t particularly mean anything or provide insight. However, it is calculated as follows;

(Revenue + Goal Value)/Unique Views of Page Before Conversion = $ Index

By ranking your content in this way, you can see which pages are having the greater affect on conversions in persuading your visitors to do the action you want them to do.

It might be that certain pages on your site are great at converting; you just aren’t directing enough of them to that particular page, and are hidden away from easy navigation. For example, in the following diagram, everyone who visits the ‘Features’ page converts, so you may wish to consider directing visitors to this more easily, or moving this content onto the homepage itself.

However, because of how the $ Index works, it is unable to provide the more comprehensive information that I, and other website owners, would like. For example, you don’t know how big a part that content played in the conversion, or if it was merely on the path to conversion, where they stayed for a couple of seconds. Ranking solely by $ Index can also leave you at risk to content being highly ranked due to small sample sizes.

However, more detailed information is available in Google Analytics, you just have to dig a little deeper to find it.

To do this, you have to create custom reports, located at the bottom of the left hand navigation, and select ‘Manage Custom Reports’ and then ‘Create New’. The potential options open to you within these custom reports is much more in depth and almost endless to find the information that would be most useful for your business. However, for the purposes of this article, I would recommend choosing just from the ‘Goals’ metrics (the column titles) and the ‘Content’ dimensions (the rows of each report), as shown in the image to the right (click to enlarge).

You then have to drag and drop the information you want into the main screen on the page. For example, in the following example, the report will show various goal metrics for each landing page. You are almost unlimited in terms of information available, and can create addition sub-dimensions and tabs (although some combinations of metrics and dimensions aren’t possible in Google Analytics).

Now armed with this information you are able to make smarter decisions about your website and its content. The best landing pages for archiving different goals, the pages which improve conversion compared to when they aren’t visited and so on. For example, one report I have previously created and use, shown below, shows me much more information about the pages on a website and their impact on conversions, from absolute quantities, monetary value and conversion rate.

This can help you better understand what your visitors are on your website to see, and the information they feel they need to make a purchase or subscribe to your feed. In this way you can not only make your website perform better, but also create happier, more loyal, website visitors.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.