What Can Journalists Do to Generate Clicks On Their Stories?
Your audience will be your lifeblood as an independent journalist. As freelancers in a primarily online industry, our employment may be contingent upon how many clicks we generate per story. And once we get the same people clicking over and over again, that can sustain us through.
But how do we get those first clicks at all? When writing independently without a newsroom’s support (and publishing independently on a blog or some other medium) not knowing the ins and outs of advertising, SEO, and how to generate a click can really obscure a journalist’s chances of success.
Walking the line of selling your story as well as being truthful with it can seem complicated, but in actuality, there are a lot of commonalities between advertising at its base and journalism. Both rely on getting out a message, and packaging that message in a certain way. Advertisements and articles also compete for attention on social media in a very similar way.
WHO’S YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?
The first question in both advertising and journalism. Bias is unavoidable as a human being, therefore, tracing one’s own biases can be useful when determining a target audience. External biases, such as the sociological culture of where you grew up or live now, can inform you on who will most respond to your voice. Understanding the difference in biases between ethnic groups, generations, religious groups, and other social groups will also inform your writing. Are you targeting millennials as a millennial? Are you targeting Gen-Z as a millennial? Understanding biases and cultural tensions between the two groups will inform you on how best to adjust your own voice to reach them.
WHAT CAN YOU GIVE AWAY?
The most interesting part of any story is its climax, but usually to generate clicks on an article, you need to give that away right away. For example, this Business Insider article from 2016 telegraphed that Americans take less vacation time than medieval peasants in order to generate clicks based on data points from a very real study that theorizes Americans are extremely overworked. Americans take an average of eight days a year of vacation, the lowest in the current world, whereas historians believe peasants living in feudal times put in no more than 150 days per year of work.
WHAT’S THE IMPACT?
The image of a medieval peasant is haggard. They existed in a time before heat and A/C, before running water, and before safe storing processes for food. And yet Americans, who social scientists say are fed propaganda that they are the greatest country in the world, work harder. The impact is in the comparison. Therefore, tying the final product together with something that invokes that comparison is essential. A video, an image, or any concrete accompaniment to drive the ridiculousness of that comparison home is the final ingredient in generating that essential click.
From there, making sure your other work is accessible from that page will naturally lead to more clicks. But drawing in that initial click to convey the important message is where a journalist’s relationship with their audience begins.
