Monetization

It's time to get ready for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday and in preparation, many of you are putting together the final touches of your/brand partners content distribution and monetization strategies; after all, according to Skimlinks, users spent an average of $132 (up 30% between 2014-15) and three times the average transaction size for all of October. Here we feature some of the examples of what the top digital publishers are doing and some tactics you can use before it is too late: 1. Buzzfeed Gift Guide Newsletter (the art of trendspotting) A topical curated list from Buzzfeed's expert trendspotting contributors consisting of their brand partners has been put together to reach a wider audience. Action - Leverage content syndication partners or reach out to key brands to create and syndicate an extensive guide through your newsletter list. If you don't have a team, you can even use Google Trends and social media to conduct a curated list of trending products. 2. Huffington Post Content Hubs Although this will need somewhat more time for planning from your end, Huffington Post is ready for providing pictures, videos and breaking Black Friday news. They have also added related categories to drive internal links (SEO) and returning visitors to the site for subsequent holidays. Action - Develop themed news and/or resource hubs on the site, reflecting the holiday season, with internal links to other related pages. 3. Business Insider Live Reporting Live reporting is definitely a move you can take as an alternative to developing content hubs, as you are benefiting from the freshness/temporal of searches that people are generating - accordingly, 25% of daily searches conducted on Google daily are from queries people have never searched for before (to confirm). Business Insider is not only providing their own purchase recommendations (similar to Buzzfeed), but they are conducting live reporting on other companies Black Friday deal events, which helps them leverage on other brand related searches. You can take this to the next level like The Telegraph has done, with robot driven journalism. Action - Conduct live reporting on events of other companies and general occurrences. 4. Popsugar - content distribution through Instagram and Pinterest So long as your audience is loyal and don't mind a product link here or there, like Popsugar you can also distribute your guides on Pinterest or Instagram through pins and imagery. 5. Investigative Reporting - Politico This approach is more across politics, individuals and general news, however, we can always look at making past comparisons and deriving what if scenarios (without providing fake news) like Politico have done, in order to provide subsequent investigative journalistic pieces. Action - Consider investigative journalism, by comparing past Black Friday events. Include sales and actionable data where possible. Is there anything that has been missed out on that is worth noting? Please comment below.