GH MEDIA THINGS TO REMEMBER WHILE DEVELOPING ONLINE MAGAZINE

1. GH MEDIA THINGS TO REMEMBER WHILE DEVELOPING ONLINE MAGAZINE The critical role of journalism can only be preserved if the industry can come through its current crisisand the person who will lead the summit. It's important for companies to see how far along the 'crisis curve' they've traveled, and there are concrete steps organizations can take to halt and even reverse that journey. We'll use those tools to illuminate for magazines industry leaders the urgency of their situation, and lay out the steps they will need to take to begin the renewal process." It sounds like they are looking at the really big questions. Boiling the ocean is always a tough challenge. Small, incremental change does work (even for huge companies). Here are some important points that every magazines should do to build there business Link Journalism - Most websites do not link out to other sites. This walled garden approach is not helping. One, from a pure search engine optimization stand-point, linking out makes tons of sense because there are presently lots of high quality links coming into their properties. GH mediasimple action will increase their ranking in the search engines; generate more page views and interest. It also speaks to trust and value. By linking out to other sites, newspapers are providing a much better user experience. Formatting- Turn those long articles into checklists or break up the content. Use bold to create headers throughout the piece. Highlight the important lines. Italicize the quotes. Reading online is not like reading a newspaper. Tagging- It is hard to believe that most newspaper sites don't have tags on every page of content. How about tag clouds? Looking at the tags helps the reader identify whether or not they even want to read the whole piece. Also, having tags makes their content (and they have a lot of it) increasingly easier to organize and search. Blog directory- Many smart newspapers post a Blog directory to let their readers know in one simple and easy area how to connect and find these great additional resources. Readers don't know or care who is a full-time employee and who is freelance. If they like the content and want more of it, newspapers should focus on that goal and ease up on the bureaucracy. Cross promote effectively- How many times have you seen a call to action in print to go online and what you're looking for is either not there or impossible to find? Most newspapers drive readers to their generic website address in hopes that the reader will scour and dig to find the content that took them there. Simply publishing the printed version online is a cop-out and is not a sustainable business model. Unique website address- Tying into #5, have unique URLs for the important pages that you are promoting. If it's a guest editorial for GH Media, promote it in the print version like this: . Tiny URLs and

2. long website addresses with lots of numbers and letter won't cut it. A great and memorable Website URL is smart marketing and promotion.