4 things we’ve been up to this spring at David Arkin Consulting

What a busy spring it’s already been! We’re often asked here at David Arkin Consulting from friends of ours in the industry — and those who are considering doing work with us — what interesting things we’re working on with clients and where we see things headed around content and revenue.

We’re currently working with newspapers, TV stations, magazines, digital pure plays, media associations and technology companies. Our services range from content creation and editing to audits to fractional digital leadership.

In this monthly newsletter, we’ll share a few interesting things happening with our clients, highlighting their successes and some tips and tricks your media company can use.

Here’s what the last few weeks have looked like at David Arkin Consulting:

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Major growth in SEO

Since November, we have been working with The Albuquerque Journal on a variety of initiatives to help grow their digital audience, including a major push with video and Reels creation among their photography staff, unique original digital content and extensive work around SEO and headline writing.

The work in SEO has realigned their headline approach to be much more SEO friendly, as well as delivering a level of curiosity that didn’t exist previously. We focused on creating unique URLs, headlines written in a conversational tone, inbound and outbound links, perfecting meta descriptions and creating unique file names for photos. The results? In April, they saw more than 100,000 more organic search users than they did the April prior.

Headline examples:

• They were promised help getting sober and a fresh start. Instead they ended up stranded in Arizona.
• Las Cruces has had a Raising Cane’s for years — here’s advice for Albuquerque residents visiting the chicken chain
• Shake it up with old school vibes: 13 Albuquerque-area diners keeping it classic

Tip: Customize your URLs. Google likes URLS in the 50-60 character count, so pack those URLs with keywords and leave the longer descriptions to your actual headlines.

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Conducting reader survey

At a publisher in upstate New York, we recently conducted a reader survey to help establish areas of interest for topics the paper covers today and ones they don’t or not often. We were able to synthesize the results for the publisher, with clear steps that led to the eventual launch of additional feature pages and guidance that will help create content in areas that digital subscribers say they have interests in.

Tip: Quick surveys are a terrific way to get insights that are actionable. For The Gazette, we simply asked 10 questions that gave us enough information to implement changes.

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Branded content takes off

Across numerous companies we’re working with, we have seen impressive results with branded content. For a publisher in New York, we helped pitch a branded content program to an advertiser and then created the content for it. Here is the first story in the campaign.

That story ended up being one of the news organization’s most viewed stories in April across all of the content they created (hundreds and hundreds of stories) and performed incredibly well with the amount of time readers spent with it on average.

Tip: Always try to sell multi-month campaigns, using a content strategist to help brainstorm ideas that will effectively tell that advertiser’s stories. This is the second story in the campaign above that we just finished.

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Unique web traffic drivers big audience growth

We recently led a TV station in South Dakota to a new content management system to help drive more digital audience and revenue. But, even before that, we began creating weekly content for the station’s website to help drive traffic by focusing on areas they weren’t before that all had big audience growth upside. The idea with our work was to prove a concept by having our company create a model on how to build the content and distribute it, and then hand it off to the local team.

Here’s what that looked like:

• We produced weekly real estate features showcasing data about the local market, all very visualized.

• We created content specifically around entertainment and things to do, both inside and outside of the coverage area, all with an eye toward creating evergreen information.

• We used available information to put together a crime blotter, but not just a list of blotter, but heat maps to help understand where crimes were happening.

• We wrote crime trends stories to help the audience understanding what crimes were happening where and when, also visualized.

Tip: Dense content like public records really become more useful for readers if you are able to use visualizations to showcase the information. Doing that consistently helps readers know what they can expect every time they open that weekly story.

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Who are we?

David Arkin Consulting helps companies significantly grow their audiences, develop new revenue streams and improve processes and technology for family-owned companies, brands, nonprofits and large media organizations.

We’re helping companies develop strategies that improve products, processes and people. We then take those ideas and help companies implement them through an effective hands-on style that gets results and teaches the companies we work with the skills they need in today’s media world. 

These are some of the areas we can help with:

📈 Strategies to quickly grow your online audience and digital revenue

✨ Branded content strategies, client presentations and content creation

📧 Monetization strategies for your email newsletter and database

🚀 Fractional digital content and revenue strategy leadership 

🎨 Print and web design services

💼 Temporarily filling your open positions and longterm hiring support

We’d love to talk with you today. Email david@davidarkinconsulting.com or go to www.davidarkinconsulting.com.