Digital Publishing: Tips to Use and Mistakes to Avoid!
Looking to polish up your digital publishing expertise? We’re here to help!
The digital publishing industry’s expansion seems endless at this point – growing more and more each year. And this growth has resulted in a surge of competition among both new and old digital publishers.
With more competition among publishers, the industry standard rises more and more each day. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up; finding the perfect balance between product quality and traffic can sometimes seem overwhelming. That’s why we’re here to help!
Let’s dive into some key tips and tricks to avoid within this digital publishing industry, as well as key mistakes to avoid along the way!
Here’s a few digital publishing tips to kick things off:
-
Always use every form of social media available to you to promote your work and projects – let people know what you’re up to and be active!
Promoting any new content or updates posted on your website is always great for garnering followers and impressions from various audiences.
Consistently promoting and posting your newest content on your social media will show new and old readers that your content is always up to date and thriving!
If a new user finds your page and sees a deep catalogue of information and content to delve into on every social media you have, it will help you seem thoroughly established, long-standing and up-to-date.
-
Your audience engagement is invaluable.
Understanding audience engagement can allow you to see which topics, articles and sources receive the most attention and interaction, which is a key indicator of how interesting your readers found the content.
Pushing for audience engagement not only helps you understand your audience better but also allows you to grow your audience even further!
If a new reader finds your site or social media and sees high interactions and likes on each post, they’re more likely to think that they may also find the topic interesting.
-
Keep a close eye on your own sites’ analytics and traffic
It’s not only social media traffic and interaction that you should keep a close eye on. The majority of established digital publishers have detailed analytics tracking systems.
These systems give insight on which pages are most visited, most interacted with, which days have the most traffic, and more!
Having a well-rounded knowledge of your own sites analytics and user-base can really help grow your numbers and consistency in both the long and short term.
-
Focus on optimizing your content for mobile users first
It’s no secret that the majority of today’s readers keep up with news primarily via their smartphones. It’s easy, quick, efficient and always on-hand.
Therefore, you must optimize your website’s mobile view as well as you can. Although the desktop view is also important, it’s also more versatile and easier to format everything cleanly onto one page. So make sure your content is formatted and fits nicely into the average mobile view.
Also, keep an eye on page load times! It’s important to understand that most mobile connections are weaker than desktop connections. Therefore, ensuring low load times on your pages will make users feel comfortable browsing your content on both mobile and desktop.
-
Add some unique variance to your content topics
Brands often make additional efforts to cover less ‘popular’ content. This both supports smaller communities and niche topics while also giving a unique experience to your readers.
Covering unique and interesting topics that are rarely covered elsewhere can really give you the upper hand regarding audience engagement and retention. But, obviously, you also need to ensure that you’re tactful and understanding with this content while also ensuring that the content is interesting for users to read.
Mistakes to avoid within digital publishing:
Now that you’re all up-to-date and informed on a few key tips for digital publishing, here’s a few common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid.
-
Make sure you don’t forget your readers’ interests
As your digital publishing space grows, ensure that you don’t forget about what your audience initially came to you for and what their current and new interests seem to be.
Understanding audience interest and behaviour is absolutely pivotal to maintaining a healthy creation and distribution process. Therefore, make sure to pay close attention to both new and pre-existing readers.
-
Make sure to prioritize quality – don’t stress too much over quantity.
Quality content is a significant factor for page rankings and audience retention. Although you may feel pressure to constantly pump out content and publish new articles, you mustn’t let that pressure affect your content quality.
A single, high-quality piece of content will always be better and more intriguing to users than several mediocre articles.
-
Don’t make your content a chore to read.
Although it’s important to make content that you’re personally passionate about, it’s also critical that you take a look at how your content is presented.If you write longer, in-depth reports on stories, then you need to make sure that it’s formatted in an easy to consume way. In addition, the structure of your story must be simple to read and consistently retain user retention throughout the article.
Using infographics, images, text formatting, or any other interactive elements that you can utilize will greatly help your users comfortably absorb the content within your article.
-
Make sure to be unique – try not to sound the same as everyone else
Everyday, more and more publishers make the shift to prioritizing their digital platforms. Effectively understanding your reader base is an incredibly valuable way to give you the upper hand against competing publishers.
It’s rather easy to jump on the bandwagon and focus on new breaking news stories. However, if you’re primarily known for in-depth, detailed stories, then it’s best to take your time and ensure that you only publish a piece of content that you feel your readers will truly appreciate.
Standing your ground and bringing your own unique vibe and feel to the digital publishing space can really help you stand out.
Conclusion
Did these tips and mistakes help? Although each digital publication is different, these are just a few broad concepts to keep in mind that could really help you grow and maintain a healthy platform if implemented correctly.
Does your digital publishing tools keep up with digitalization and your editors’ needs? Let’s show you how easy it is to create and distribute content with Bold Headless CMS.
