We freelance writers live strange lives. I write regularly for a few publications, Network World being one of them, yet despite the fact that I am a regular contributor I don’t have a ton of insight into the inner workings of that magazine.
Which tech trends generate the most interest? What types of stories – how to, thought leader, profile, product testing – perform best? How do search engines most commonly direct readers to the site?
Stories like this win over editors
If you’re an in-house writer, you’ve probably had this stuff drilled into your head. We freelancers have to dig a little deeper. We have some tools at our disposal which hint at these things (kind of like an astronomer finding planets through their gravitational effects), but we never know for sure. Even if we ask editors, what they told us a month ago may no longer apply today, and, believe me, editors don’t have the time to constantly update freelancers to keep them in the loop.
So, savvy freelancers do things like study the most-emailed stories lists, check on comment volumes, and track retweets.
I recently heard from my Network World editor, Neal Weinberg. He gave me and a few other freelancers a year-end update. Neal and the editorial staff are extremely happy with the features they’ve been getting from us, and they want more.
The page views for our feature stories tend to generate three, four or five times the number of page views as, say, a typical high-profile product review. With this information in hand, I want to unpack some characteristics of top-performing stories to give subscribers to this newsletter insight into what works best for this particular publication.
For 2011, here are some of the top-performing stories by us freelance feature writers:
*4 reasons Windows Phone 7 will beat iPhone and Android . . . and 3 reasons it won’t, by Jeff Vance
*5 hot social media sites, by Julie Sartain
*Internet2 turns 15. Has it delivered on its promise? By Julie Sartain
*16 essential Android apps for IT pros, by Eric Geier
*How to solve Windows 7 crashes in minutes, by Dirk A.D. Smith
*Future of Malware, by Jeff Vance
What’s the trend in common with all of these? Content-wise, I’m not sure I see a single unifying one. It’s a mix of forward-looking, put-this-on-your-radar types of stories with practical how-to stories. If there is one theme it is probably that these appeal to IT readers at all levels. CIOs and first-year IT pros alike can find value in the stories.
Another theme is the importance of keywords and SEO. I would guess (but I don’t know this for certain) that my Windows Phone 7 story would have had fewer page views if “Android” and “iPhone” weren’t in the title.
Let’s look at Dirk A.D. Smith’s Windows 7 crash story. Google this – windows 7 crash solve – and you’ll return 180 million pages. Tweak that search to – window 7 crash fix – and you only get 53 million. Hmmm.
Look at Julie Sartain’s social media story and do the same experiment with hot social media sites versus top social media sites and you’ll find that hot returns more than three times as many pages.
What’s the take-away here? You need to change how you pitch stories.
I no longer simply pitch stories to my editors. Well, to the editors I work with all the time, I do, but when I pitch a new editor, or when I’m ghostwriting thought leadership articles and pitching them around, much of my pitch is devoted to why the story will perform well. If it’s a story under my byline, I point to my Story Source Newsletter, my Twitter followers and my LinkedIn network.
Take the time to look at your target publication and try to determine whether or not your story idea has a chance of ending up on the top-read/top-emailed lists. Why will your story drive page views? What about the content of the story will attract readers? (Look to Google trends and other similar tools to back your assertion.)
If your story idea doesn’t mesh well, can you tweak it so that it does? Can you find the context surrounding the idea that will make people care? Let me give an example. I recently ghostwrote a story for a mobile CEO about mobile trends for 2012. (I know I’m doing a lot of those lately.) In its first iteration, it was the standard, here-are-my-predictions, and here’s-some-backing-data type of story.
The first editor rejected it. (A quick aside: I use a few of my PR partners to pitch stories I ghostwrite. I don’t want to create confusion pitching editors other people’s stories when I may pitch my own on down the line.)
It took a few simple tweaks to make the next editor jump and accept it less than a day after I submitted it. First, I changed the title to focus on fear. If the trends were ignored, IT pros could lose their jobs. Next, I made it more vendor-neutral. You’ve all fought this fight, so you know the headache here, but having an editor’s email saying it is too vendor-centric helps you lead that CEO horse to vendor-neutral water.
Next, I layered on some keywords that were trending well. And finally, since this was an editor I hadn’t worked with before, I hyped up my promotional capabilities.
That’s it. Same story, 30 minutes of editing and vastly different results. Better: the original editor who rejected it contacted me to say that he wished I would have tried back with the revision because he saw the story and really liked it with those minor, but important changes.
Turning back to PR pitches, can you find ways to make those sorts of changes to your own pitches? The most important one, obviously, is explaining how you and your client will help promote the story. Other questions to answer: Are you uniquely positioned in some way to help generate buzz? Does your client have a high-traffic blog that will link to the story? Does your client (or your firm) have thousands of Twitter followers who will be alerted when the story posts? Does your client have a newsletter with a ton of subscribers that you can use to promote the story?
These days, those things matter. Yet, I never hear about them in the pitches I get.
For the past few years, we journalists have learned that to be successful our job no longer stops when we publish the story. We absolutely must promote it or we won’t be competitive. If our stories don’t drive page views, our assignments dry up.
The same is true for PR and marketing. Getting your client coverage isn’t enough. Once the story runs, promote it, promote it, and promote it some more. If you do and you achieve good results, editors will remember your name, will sort your pitches to the top of the queue, and your success rate will skyrocket.
