Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers

Going digital isn’t easy. Here at Boxcar Marketing we’ve been struggling with the lack of information available on how publishers can go digital.

If you’re a publisher who’s ready to implement a digital strategy and want more information on digital formats, distribution, and digital rights management, SFU’s Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers workshop is a great opportunity to learn the steps to digitization.

Put on by SFU’s Summer Publishing Workshops, the workshop runs July 23 - 24 at SFU Harbourcentre.

The cost for both days is $275.

From the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop website:

This workshop will provide answers and prompt questions to get the information you need to create your own digital roadmap. If you are not doing something, you may find you will soon be playing catch up. By the end of the two days you will understand the phrases and definitions and identify what kinds of formats best suit your needs. Some key points you will learn:

* Determine which formats can best deliver your content
* Determine business objectives for an initial foray into digital publishing
* Determine your requirements from third party service providers
* Understand XML
* Discuss the pros and cons of DRM
* Hear what the future of publishing may look like

For full details visit the Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers page.

Download the registration form here.

Live Optimization: Improve your SEO Clicks and Conversions

Everyone wants to rank #1 on Google, but how do you get your site to rank higher? MarketingExperiments held a web clinic: Live Optimization: Improve your SEO Clicks and Conversions, to explain how to better optimize your site for search. These are their tips.

There are two trends in search:
1) It’s getting more and more competitive to get to the top of search rankings.
2) If you’re not on the first page, you’re invisible - as of a 2008 study, 68% of web users never get past the first page.

5 SEO Factors You Must Get Right

1) Keywords
* They should be short and concise.
* Scour competitive sites for keywords that would bring in a lot of potential traffic.

2) Content
* Place keywords strategically within the content on your site
* You need 100 - 500 pages of content on your site to rank at the top (this is why blogs rank high).

3) Meta Content
* This is what Google sees; it is the code behind each of your pages.
* Titles and meta-descriptions (what searchers see on Google) are what matter.
* Page Titles: Don’t put the company name first, your site is already ranking high on your company name so you’re wasting ‘juice’.
* Use two key phrases in the first two positions in the page title. Use a word separator between keywords like a bar, dash or comma. Don’t use ‘&’, use ‘and’.
* Descriptions: It’s important to have unique meta descriptions on every page. It’s what searchers see on Google so it needs to be compelling

4) URLs
* You need your keywords in the urls of your pages.
* Keywords should be separated with a dash.

5) Inbound Links
* Often called ‘link juice’.
* These are one-way links from other highly regarded, relevant sites linking to you.
* It’s good to have inbound links coming from highly regarded blogs, articles, press releases, forms and directories.
* You need a certain number of links linking to all of your pages - not just your homepage.
* The clickable link and the descriptive text surrounding the link (anchor text) should contain your keywords.

For more information watch the full web clinic video.

Looking for related information? Check out Stickyeyes.com’s SEO Tips for 2007. This is a great article with excellent, easy to follow tips that still apply in 2009.

Web Content Management Workshop

Join Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing and other tech-savvy panelists for an informative workshop on web content management, put on by
SFU Summer Publishing Workshops.

The workshop runs August 4 - 6 at SFU Harbourcentre. The cost for all three days is $500.

From the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop website:
“We’ll introduce you to web content management tools and what they offer. We’ll talk about book content, magazine copy, marketing messages, images and other media, and of course the web itself and the audience connections it makes possible. We’ll cover software and techniques; when it’s appropriate to manage content yourself and when it’s appropriate to contract an external Digital Asset Manager. Most importantly, we’ll focus on how to do all of this without breaking the bank.”

Monique will be on the panel along with Haig Armen, creative director of LiFT Studios; Geoff D’Auria site manager for The Tyee; Kim Elliott publisher of rabble.ca; Joy Gugeler publisher and editor-in-chief of orato.com; Brian Lamb manager of emerging technologies and digital content with the office of learning technology at UBC; Boris Mann entrepreneur and web strategist; and John Maxwell assistant professor in the Master of Publishing Program at SFU.

For full details go to the Web Content Management workshop page.

Download the PDF registration form here.