Cookeville, Tennessee – June 5, 2010 - We’ve been working on our online news publishing system since March of 2005. During this time we have served about twenty online newspapers, and we have listened to their suggestions and requests.

One of the most frequent of these requests has been for us to provide functionality that will allow our customers to control the way their news site looks on the front end without having to pay a programmer to create a new template for them every time they want to make a modification.

We’ve listened, and our customers can now create and modify their own templates without having to hire technical staff to do it. This is new in this industry, [more]

You won’t need much to start publishing your own newspaper online. You'll need access to a computer with an Internet connection. If you are going to publish pictures (and why wouldn't you?),  [more]

Our existing customers as well as prospective customers often ask me for my thoughts on how to market an online newspaper. In most cases what they are asking is how they can introduce the newspaper to more and more readers and increase their daily traffic so they can have significant numbers to show potential advertisers. So how do you get the public to start reading the content on your site? Here are some suggestions:

1. Toot your horn. Prepare and send out press releases to all media outlets in your market. Although some of them may be your competitors, some of them may publish or broadcast your press release. Try to do this by email if possible because they can easily copy and paste your press release.

2. Get others to market for you. If you can contact one person who will contact two hundred people for you, you can build your readership very quickly. How do you do this? Offer some free exposure to churches and other groups. Invite church leaders to write a regular inspirational column, alternating authors once a week or at whatever interval works for you. Get local college and high school journalism teachers on board, and have them recruit student reporters to write regularly for your newspaper. Develop a pool of citizen reporters to write regularly for you. If you have sections in your newspaper that they are passionate about, they will write for you, and their friends and families all the way down to their third cousins will read what they write. By creatively getting others to market for you, you will be able to build more quickly a community of readers. If you get up to a consistent 1000 hits a day, you will have something that you can show and sell to advertisers.

3. Report the local news. Big newspapers may be failing, but community newspapers that report the local news are thriving. People want to know what is going on around them. Go to school board meetings, county commission meetings, city council meetings, and all other public meetings. Take an inexpensive video camera with you and get some good clips and post them on YouTube or some other third party server and then embed the code in your news site. People will watch the video. It is easy to do this with our publishing system. For some interesting discussions in this regard, just google "hyperlocal news" and "citizen journalism".

4. Do investigative journalism and report on controversial issues in your community. In other words be a watchdog. That is the primary function of the press in a democracy. If you report on controversial issues in your community, people will read your stories.

5. Publish police and sheriff's public arrest records. You have a right to access these records and to publish them. People will read them if you publish them.

6. Do regular profiles on people. And not just "important" people but rather a wide spectrum of people. People love people. I have found that people are just as interested in the business of the guy that runs the hotdog cart as they are in the local furniture factory. Your community is full of artists and street vendors and elderly people who are still happily working, and gardeners, and old preachers and priests, and on and on. If you are a publisher these are your people, your community, and you need to help them get to know each other better. If you write about them, they will read your newspaper.

7. Stay fresh. Publish something every day. Every day has its news.

8. Scoop. If you attend a contentious city council meeting, get your story online within minutes after the meeting. Better yet, invest in a mobile broadband account and post updates as the meeting progresses. I pay $60 a month with Sprint and can post stories from anywhere as long as I have a cell signal, which is just about everywhere, even out in the boonies here in Tennessee. If you can scoop regularly, people will start looking to you first for the news.

9. Give every business and other entity in your market six months free listing in the yellow pages of your online newspaper. Such a listing is actually a mini website where they can provide lots of information including graphics about themselves. This will build traffic.

10. Report on school sports, and use lots of pictures. I cannot stress enough how important this can be as part of your marketing strategy.

11. Provide free classifieds.

12. Put polls throughout your newspaper. People love to vote in polls and learn what the community is thinking and how their thoughts fit with those of the community.

13. Publish an events calendar. If you can keep your events calendar loaded people will visit your site to keep up with what is scheduled. Make your site the go to place for community schedules.

If you would like some information on how to start your own online newspaper, send us an email at publishing@publishanewspaper.com and please put "online newspaper" in the subject line, without the quotes.

 [more]

News articles and other stories will in most cases be the backbone of your newspaper. In the Readmore publishing system it's easy to post these articles to your publication.

Literally within a few hours of signing up with us, you can be putting stories into your newspaper with pictures, formatted text, headlines, and display ads.

And if you have any questions at all, we are just a phone call or email away. Our technical support is always free.

 

If you have sent us emails and haven't heard from us it's because some of our responses are bouncing back to us when we reply to you. Please make sure that you use a valid email address and that your mailbox is not full when you send us an inquiry. We just received one from the UK from someone named Romez, and it bounced when we replied. 

I recently received an inquiry from a student in an entrepreneurship class at one of our nation's major universities. I believe that his question and my response will be helpful to many of you who visit the site and who wonder whether it would be economically feasible for you to start your own online newspaper. So here it is: [more]

Have you ever wanted to start your own newspaper online? Well now you can, and for a lot less than you think. Or if you're already publishing a print version, our newspaper hosting service and software provide the very best way for you to go online with your existing paper.

 [more]