A Clear Path To 100k In Digital Revenue For Local Publishers

A lot has changed for local publishers over the past 10 years. Technology has displaced the traditional methods most publishers use to generate the majority of their revenue and rendered other methods moot (Craigslist and classifieds for example). While we strongly believe that print is far from dying, those publishers that fail to adapt to the changing media landscape will be left behind.

So what does that mean?

It used to be that a traditional print ad or banner ad online delivered enough value, in the form of new customers, to keep your advertisers happy but as technology has evolved marketing has become way more complex. As a result, business are facing greater and greater challenges in setting themselves apart from their competition.

Forward-thinking publishers will realize that while the underlying goals of a business haven't changed, they are facing a new set of challenges as a result. Publishers that learn how to solve these problems for their advertisers will be able to weather the storm and even thrive in the new media landscape.

So what does this new landscape look like?

In a word, diversification. Traditional print ads will still make up the core for most publishers but being able to leverage existing technology, like the IMPACT Marketing Suite, or Locable's Print-to-Web strategy, to help tell a unique story and increase reach across multiple channels simultaneously provides tremendous value to your advertisers, strengthens your relationships with advertisers and provides long-term stability for your publication.

Below outlines how you can combine banner ads, native advertising, digital services and listings to make 100k per year in digital revenue. While getting to this level will take time, we suggest starting with Community Sponsorships so that you are profitable from the beginning and then build on that by combining different elements into packages that solve specific problems for your advertisers (Community Sponsorships are one example of such a package as it includes a directory listing, a banner ad and a sponsored article among other things).