
For running a successful online newspaper venture you will need a lot of tools which
will make publishing very easy and economical. These days we find a software for
about everything but there are tools available in the market which are free or open-source
and using them to publish your online newspaper becomes a child's play. You don't
need to know any html code or other similar coding language, by using newspaper
website builder you just need to copy paste or embed such scripts on your site and
CMS does the rest of the work. Here are some tools and services which will enable
you to publish with ease.
1. Web Traffic Analysis: One of the most popular services to keep track of
your visitors is by using Google Analytics. This is a free service and signing up
is very easy, after signing up you need to go through some easy steps like giving
the site URL and after completing the steps you get a tracking code which you need
to place on your site. After the code is placed you can start to see results within
a few days. They offer in-depth analysis and you can keep track about not only how
many visitors but where did the visitors come from, which was the most viewed section,
from which region did the visitor come from, the devices used by the visitors and
so on. Google also offers the webmaster services and you can integrate this account
with other Google services. It's easy, fast and most importantly reliable. You can
also opt to use other such services including the ones which give you a real time
analysis of your online newspaper visitors.
2. Video Publishing: Publishers are often faced by the dilemma when it comes
to video posting, some prefer to upload them on their own servers but the most popular
way is to upload your videos on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. You
can create your channels and upload videos there, best part is you also get the
embed scripts from these sites which can be used on your online news publication.
It offers very flexible embed codes which can be adjusted in size according to the
video window you want on your news site. It also ensures that your site isn't affected
by overload as the video is displayed on your site but behind the scene it's coming
from YouTube servers.
3. Comments Plugin: Allowing comments for the stories posted on your online
newspaper templates is also a very important and popular feature. It gives the readers
an opportunity to share their views on the subject. You should ensure that your
newspaper host has an inbuilt comment tool in addition it should have the flexibility
to accommodate other similar tools like
Disqus and Facebook. These tools also give you the flexibility to login
and post comments using your Google, Yahoo, Aol, etc. accounts.
4. Social Media Sharing: People love social networking and whenever they
stumble across an interesting article they immediately look for sharing buttons
like
addthis
,
sharethis
. These plugins can be easily placed at the top, bottom or both the places of an
article to give the readers the flexibility to share the story online on various
platforms.
5. RSS Feed: RSS(Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is also
a very popular way to publish latest site updates over the web. Sites like
feed2js allows embedding RSS feed
of other sites on your own site, by providing feed link which then provides JavaScript
code that can be used on your site. This all sounds tricky but it's real easy to
both bring other feeds to your site and place your news feeds over the internet.
6. Social Networks: It's now a trend to create Facebook, Twitter, Google
Plus pages for your site as the viewership base due to this vast network is so enormous
that you simply can't afford to neglect them. Platforms like these help you to spread
the word in a manner which reaches the subscribed parties with similar interests
for any particular topic. Business pages of various news portals are present on
these platforms and sharing the news has never been so easier.
7. Email Newsletters: Newsletters help you to directly engage with your subscribers.
It's very important to choose the right company for this job as it involves sending
emails in bulk and all parties involved should follow the anti-spam policies. Having
a newspaper host which provides inbuilt newsletter feature which allows you to integrate
your account with such services so you can directly send the newsletters from your
newspaper CMS account is a big plus considering the hectic task of uploading and
managing email lists and latest news feeds. Some of the websites providing these
services are
mailchimp
,
constantcontact
8. Flip Books: News publishing can also be present in print or digital format.
Often the replica of print version is converted into digital editions so users can
refer to them online. These are also known as e-editions.
Issuu.com provides such services for publishing
online flip books. All these formats are very popular but the online newspaper is
the one which is more flexible as the latest news can be uploaded in minutes and
updated frequently which isn't possible with the print and digital versions.
9. Audio Publishing: Audios and flash are also often used on various newspaper
templates. Radio station sites also use these and publishers often subscribe to
free services from sites like
Soundcloud and
Audioboo
to generate the scripts/code for such feeds.
10. Other Tools: Some other tools and services which can be easily used by
publishers are:
Storify - is a
great tool for pulling feeds from twitter, Flickr, Facebook into one place to tell
a story.
Pinterest
- is a smart way to share images and links.
Delicious - is
a simple bookmarking and sharing tool.
Kizoa - is also
a good source for making slideshows.
Evernote - acts
as a digital notebook accessible from any online device with an internet connection,
allowing you to save photos, audio files, web pages and notes for later use.
If you look around the internet you will come across a lot of similar service providers
who offer both paid and free services. You should try to zero upon a host and try
their services to see whether it helps you to make the news site better in any way.
With the flexibility offered by the newspaper CMS software, publishers should also
take full advantage and use these scripts on your news site to promote the daily
in an effective manner.