The Sphere of Influence and the Small Online Publisher

MediaPost published my column in The Online Publishing Insider tonight entitled "The Sphere of Influence and the Small Online Publisher."

I wanted to profile my fiancee in the article, but she wouldn't let me. So I'll do it here because my circulation is smaller than MediaPost's (but my sphere of influence here should, if I'm correct, be higher - meaning that a lot of you will click through to her site.)

We moved to Bethesda, MD from NYC. One of her favorite resources in NYC was CitySearch.com. But CitySearch.com for the DC area is atrocious. (Hello, CitySearch - anybody home?) There are rankings for restaurants, but no evidence that anyone responsible for the rankings has ever visited the restaurants. No descriptions, menus, photographs of the interior - no sign of intelligent life anywhere.

Enter Bethesda Rookie - my fiancee's solution to the CitySearch problem. Read it. Just pick 3 random entries and read them. Now mark your calendar to come back in a month and read again, when the site is chock-a-block with the same rich content and authentic voice. Does CitySearch have a problem? You bet it does.

 

And that's really the point of the article - that an authentic voice unburdened by fiscal pressure creates a competitor large publishers have to be worried about. And with a million of them (us) out there, each after only 50-100 of a big player's massive audience, none of them individually poses a threat. But collectively they're more than a distraction - they're a disruption.

If you don't want to read the full article, here's the executive summary:

• Bloggers (I call them Small Online Publishers in the article, but by and large they are bloggers) do not have the same objectives as large publishers (by these I mean CNET, iVillage, CitySearch, New York Times, etc.)
• They are more interested in having their voice heard than they are in increasing advertising revenues.
• In fact, most of them (us) don't care about revenues at all.
• Yet they're in many cases after the same audience. And they can write whatever they want to attract them. (Or in some cases they're not after ANY particular audience, and by saying anything they want, they END UP attracting them.)
• This makes them Irrational Competitors. They don't play by the same rules, and can't be competed with by the same rules.
• They're (we're) interested in growing our Sphere of Influence. The articles provides a number of metrics to measure this sphere. They're not the most readily available, nor are they always intuitive.
• Por ejemplo, it's easy (and addictive!) to pay attention to where traffic comes in from. But it's more telling to see where traffic is going out to. Seeing what percentage of your visitors you can shuttle off to an external link because you so recommend is a good way to measure how much your audience values your opinion. (This is why the blogosphere, by the way, is as influential as it is - the voices are authentic and trusted, and if a blogger tells its audience to check out Site X or Promotion Y, the audience largely cooperates.)
• I also suggest that Technorati and similar rankings can be a poor proxy for sphere of influence because what they really measure are influence on other bloggers. And for most small publishers, while some of their target audience is in fact bloggers, in most cases they are not part of the target because they are bloggers. Unless you're Steve Rubel or Hugh McLeod, this probably isn't the case.
• I also recommend that all small publishers launch an AdWords campaign and buy up all the keywords with their name and their site's name - Partially to help an audience find you if you're not showing up on natural search, but mostly as a measure of unaided brand awareness.

Believe it or not, nobody searches for 'e-venting.net'. But as soon as someone does, I'll know about it. Even if they don't click through.

Comments

[Maurice Cardinal]

Could not have said it better.
You described me perfectly.

Maurice Cardinal
Editor OlyBLOG.com

[Mike May]

Hi Maurice-

Thanks for the note. Great blog, by the way. I lived in Vancouver myself for 2 years and am thrilled to attend the Olympics there. Your insight into its underbelly is fascinating. Keep at it.

-Mike