One effective, low-cost way to expand your presence online is to launch a podcast.

Our-Hometown CEO Matt Larson recently connected with Tom Lappas of the Henrico Citizen, who started producing the Henrico News Minute podcast last fall, to discuss their foray into podcasting. With help from Tom, we’ve provided some tips on getting started and other general information below.

Getting Started

Starting a podcast may seem like a daunting task that requires a large time commitment, and for a lot of publishers, this might be the main reason why you haven’t already started one. Tom felt this way, too, but even he was surprised at how easy it was to get setup. He mentions that he was able to pick up some basic podcasting equipment for cheap during a Black Friday sale, but depending on the vision you have for your podcast, you probably don’t have to wait until November — a small one-or-two person production requires little more than a couple of microphones, an audio interface, and a computer to record with.

The Henrico Citizen staff already uses Apple Macintosh computers, which come with the audio-editing software Garage Band pre-installed.

Choosing a Format

Traditionally, when people think of podcasts, they probably think of a lengthy, in-depth conversation around a particular topic or idea. For some, that is a turnoff — not everybody has the time to sit down and listen to an hour-long podcast. While certainly that model can work for some, it may not make as much sense for a local newspaper.

Tom has taken a completely different approach with the Henrico News Minute, marketing it as a short five-minute listen akin to the hourly ad-reads or weather updates you’ll hear on the radio. They record a brief segment every morning, touching on the day’s news and also highlighting any ongoing community events.

Choosing a Podcasting Service

Now that you’ve chosen a format and recorded your first episode, it’s time to upload it to the web and share it with your listeners. In order to do that, you’ll need to register with a podcasting service that handles hosting of the audio and distribution to numerous streaming platforms.

A few examples to check out, as recommended by our customers, are listed below:

BuzzSprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/
PodBean: https://www.podbean.com/
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/

Most hosts will allow you to embed your podcast player directly into your existing website so that you can display it in a prominent position where it will get viewers attention, or on a dedicated page backed up with extra information about the podcast.

How much will all of this cost?

You’re probably wondering is, “how much is this going to cost?”

Not surprisingly, your main expense will be the equipment that you need to get your idea up and running. Again, this will vary depending on the scope of your podcast, but equipment for a small one-or-two person production should be quite affordable. You’ll just need a couple of microphones, an audio interface, and a computer to record with. You could even go super-low-budget and simply use your cell phone to record and upload audio.

Podcast services like the aforementioned BuzzSprout, PodBean or SoundCloud allow you to upload and host your podcast at no charge, with certain limitations on each service ranging from the length of each podcast to the the total filesize. These providers will allow you to share your podcast over popular streaming services like Apple Podcast and Spotify as well.

While most services will offer an upgraded Premium plan, you should be able to get your podcast off the ground without any monthly cost.

What’s Next?

Start recording!

The most important part of growing a podcast from the ground up is to be consistent. You want to produce content as often as you’re able to, but you want to avoid a situation where one month you release several episodes, and then watch your listener count fall off the following month because you only had time to produce one episode. Come up with a schedule that works well for your staff and audience, and stick to it.

From there, the sky is the limit and how you market the content is up to you. To grow your listener count, it makes sense to offer your podcast for free and list it on Spotifty, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other popular podcast directories — but you could get creative and experiment with things like offering early-access to paid subscribers before releasing each episode to the public a few days later.

If you build a strong listener base, it will be easy to recruit Sponsors for your Podcast. Tom mentions that during the early stages of his podcast, he has featured some of his larger clients as episode sponsors as an act of goodwill, but will eventually move to monetize these sponsorships for additional revenue.

If you have any questions or need further support on this topic, feel free to reach out to our support team by e-mailing ops@our-hometown.com anytime!

Check out some examples from our customers who are currently producing Podcasts on their website:

The Henrico Citizen’s “Henrico News Minute”: https://www.henricocitizen.com/
The Acorn’s “Branching Out” Podcast: https://www.theacorn.com/

The post Starting a Podcast: Publisher Interview with Tom Lappas of the Henrico Citizen first appeared on Our-Hometown.

One obvious way that newspapers can serve students is by offering Discounted Student Subscriptions to college students or households with school-aged children. Many newspapers already offer subscriptions to students at a discounted rate, although that often only includes delivery during the 8-or-9 month school year. Show students and parents that you support the value of education, even while it isn’t on the forefront of a lot of minds under these circumstances.

One publisher has explored requesting additional funds through a grant that would allow them to give out up to 300 local newspaper subscriptions for free to families with students in the district! This is particularly exciting because many of those free subscriptions may eventually translate into paid subscriptions.

If you have the resources, your newspaper could also experiment with including more educational material. With everyone cooped up at home, there may not be many exciting news stories to cover live — but history, math, and science haven’t changed! Spice up your traditional “kids” page with something a little more geared towards exercising kids’ brains rather than a simple picture to color. Maybe even collaborate with local schools to produce a packet of worksheets for parents to use in their home “classrooms!”

Contests are a great way to get readers to engage with your website; so maybe try some education-related contests that students can enter from home. Ask them to write a short story and share it online, or build a science project and submit videos through your website — where the winner can win a free subscription or gift certificate to a local business.

If you can highlight the educational value of your newspaper, parents will buy-in — and they’d be even more inclined to do so at a discounted price like mentioned above!

The post Schools Out: Serving students during a global pandemic first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Truthfully, a page like this is something that you could keep live year-round, but the support has likely never been needed as much as it is needed now. Fortunately, in a lot of communities, the readers have really risen to the occasion and donated substantial amounts to their local newspapers. A handful of newspapers on our network have launched their own donation pages, and together they’ve raised well over $10,000 in a little over a week! Don’t be ashamed to ask for help! 

The Donation Form itself can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. Generally, since your goal is to get the reader to give you money, you’ll want to keep it short and sweet so that they don’t get bored and leave the page. Most customers collect the contributor’s name and email address (for e-mail receipt delivery), while others elect to include address and phone number as well. If you want to have some fun with it, you could allow a place for the reader to leave an encouraging note for your staff or for the newspaper industry in general!

Your donation form can be setup so that the reader can choose from a few pre-determined donation amounts, or select an option to enter a custom donation amount. Alternatively, you could just allow them to enter a custom amount from the start. Once they’ve entered a donation amount, “checkout” is quick & easy using your preferred payment gateway.

Once the Donation Form is live on your website, you’ll want to attract readers’ attention to the page. There are a number of methods we can use to get the word out.

1. Popup Message & Button

One effective way to draw attention to your donation page is to have a message popup on the reader’s screen when they visit the site explaining the dire circumstances that the industry faces and offering a link for the reader to contribute. You don’t want to be too intrusive to the point where it is annoying and drive readers away, but a popup message that only shows up once a week for a reader is a fair compromise.

2. Message & Button at the end of Articles

Another method of getting eyes on your donation page is to include your plea for help in as many areas as possible — again, without being too intrusive or annoying to the reader. We’ve found that placing a boxed message at the end of every article on your website is a great way to achieve this. This way, your message is appearing on just about every page that the reader visits on your website, however, it isn’t getting in anybody’s way and is only really visible once the reader has reached the end of the article they are reading.

3. Prominent Ad or Button Placement

A more straight-forward way of doing things would be to simply place a button or advertisement prominently on your homepage. Whether it is just a simple button or you’ve developed an actual advertisement-style graphic, putting a link front & center where readers would normally expect to see a commercial advertisement is sure to grab their attention.

While these are three solid techniques for soliciting donations, the list doesn’t end there. Make sure to put a basic link on your site’s mobile menu and even in the footer. Include a note or message from the publisher in a newsletter or upcoming edition asking for donations. And definitely blast it out on social media if you have an active following on Twitter, Facebook, or the like.

If you’re interested in setting up a page to accept Donations from your readers, please contact us today by emailing ops@our-hometown.com.

The post Accepting donations on your website first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Below are 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Mailing List!

1. A Newsletter Signup Form

The first, and most obvious, method for growing your mailing list is to place an attractive, easily-visible sign form on your website to entice readers to join the mailing list. You could put this newsletter form on your website’s sidebar, in the footer area, or even in the article itself using a post-injection ad — just make sure it is somewhere that readers will be able to see it. Make note of what kind of e-mails your readers will receive: daily/weekly edition notices, breaking news updates, special offers & coupons, etc.

As a customer of Our-Hometown, your website came pre-equipped with a Newsletter Signup widget on your homepage.

2. Require Free Account to Read Content (Registration Wall)

Many newspapers are dropping their Paywalls as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, allowing their readers free access to important news and information published to their website. And while dropping the paywall almost certainly results in higher readership, that doesn’t necessarily translate to any more money for your publication. The readers visiting your site for free, without an account, will reap the benefits until the paywall is restored, and then who knows — maybe they’ll subscribe, or maybe they’ll forget about you and never come back.

The Registration Wall is a great solution to this problem. You are still offering all of your content for free, but users will have to create an account to access it. When they create an account, they are added to your mailing list. Additionally, when you’re ready to turn your Paywall back on, you’ll have a list of “Free Accounts” that you can target with special offers and discounts to convert them to paid subscribers.

3. Require Free Account to Comment

The premise here is similar to the above: Any time a user creates an account on your website, they’ll need to enter an e-mail address which is then added to your mailing list. Usually, this means that Paid Subscribers are added to the mailing list as part of their subscription, but the same principle is true for Free Accounts.

Requiring your readers to create a Free Account to comment on articles is a great way to generate more registrations, which in turn means a larger mailing list for your newsletter.

4. Contests

Contests and giveaways are a fun and creative way to catch readers interest and procure e-mail addresses for you mailing list.

Consider a weekly Trivia Question where readers can submit their answers, along with their name and e-mail address, for a chance to win a prize. The prize doesn’t really matter — it could be a free subscription to your website, or a gift certificate donated by a local restaurant — whatever you think might grab your readers attention. Of course, in order to submit their answer and win the prize, the reader must agree to join the mailing list.

There are other contests you can run as well.

The Bee Newspapers have ran a “Find the Fake” contest in the past, inviting readers to scour their classifieds section and identify the classified ad that is just a little to obscure to be real. If a reader correctly identifies the “fake” ad, they are awarded the prize.

You could do something similar and have readers submit their answers through a form where their e-mail is collected and later added to the mailing list.

And last, but definitely not least:

5. Promote in Print!

You should always promote your website in the print edition so that readers know where to go for updates or more information, but this is especially true if you are trying to grow your mailing list.

You want as many visitors as possible coming to the website, but sometimes that means giving them a reason to come:

• Point out that newsletter subscribers will receive occasional offers and discounts.
• Invite readers to create an account to join the discussion online.
• If you have to promote a special contest in the print edition to get more visitors on the website, do it!

These are a just a few very easy techniques to generate some extra newsletter subscribers on your website. If you’d like to share your own ideas, feel free to e-mail us at ops@our-hometown.com — we’d love to hear from you!

The post 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Mailing List! first appeared on Our-Hometown.