What does it mean to be digital first? It means publishing your articles on the Internet before you publish them in any print products you have.
In the typical print-based strategy that manifested from the 1960s all the way to the early 2000s, companies would write articles and publish them in print materials such as magazines, newspapers and newsletters.
Enter the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web came along in 1995, and by 2000, most publishing companies had websites, although they were afterthoughts. On these websites, they would take articles that ran in their print publications and repost them online. This is a print-first, digital-second strategy.
But since 2000, and due more to the growth of cell phone usage than computers but both taking some credit, online media has become pervasive, while print is shrinking.
Today's digital-first strategy
In today's media world, the most progressive companies are reversing that business model—they're publishing online first, and then pulling from online content to build print products. This is a digital-first strategy.
But simply publishing online first is not the crux of the strategy. A digital first strategy depends on data gleaned from Google Analytics.
What Google Analytics does
Google Analytics collects viewership data on everything you post. It will rank number of views of all your articles for the life of the site, for a year, for a month, or just for a particular article.
But here's the holy grail: It also gives you the most searched keyword terms on your site. Perhaps you run a health site. You can look at these keyword terms and know that people are very interested in nutrition but not in breast cancer, or very interested in osteoporosis treatments but not so much in macular degeneration.
Why is this important? Because if you write about what people are looking for, they will find your content and read it, and you will get more views. If you simply write what you like to write or what you think people want to read, you may be surprised to find that you're not get the page views you desire.
If your site is advertising supported, then managing your content according to keyword strength is critical. The more you are able to provide the content that people are looking for, the more page views you will get, and the more ad sales you will generate.
See my previous article, How to Let Google Analytics Drive Your Digital Content.
And stay tuned for my next article, how to write for search engine optimization (i.e., Google).
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