3 Offline Revenue Opportunities for Local Publishers
In parts 1-3 of this series we talked about the more traditional revenue opportunities publishers have including:
- Digital Advertising Opportunities for Businesses
- Digital Revenue Opportunities Targeting your Audience (Readers)
- Traditional Print Advertising Opportunities
Today, in part 4, we’ll cover offline revenue opportunities for publishers and then wrap up with opportunities for selling marketing tools and services to local businesses in parts 5-6.
Publishers, especially community focused publishers, often miss a huge opportunity to leverage their reach by organizing and participating in events within the community. While outside the normal comfort zone for many publishers, they are uniquely positioned to promote physical events and therefore make great event partners. Let’s take a look at the 3 most common types:
- Local Farmers Market
1) Events
“Events” is a pretty generic term but in this case, we mean events focused around promoting local businesses. This could be an event that gathers local businesses in one place like a fair or farmers market but could also be something specific to one business such as a grand opening party or an event sale. In either case, you should charge for participation and then leverage your audience to promote the event and drive attendance. You should also plan on having a physical presence at each event in order to act as a welcoming party and interact with your community on behalf of the business or businesses. Depending on how much of the event you are actually organizing should determine what you ultimately charge.
2) Seminars
Seminars are a great way to further engage your local community and you can hold them for either consumers or local businesses as both provide potential revenue streams. For readers, you could hold a how-to seminars related to content you publish in print and/or online. For example, if you write an article about a local yarn store, you could collaborate with the business to host a seminar to teach people how to knit. Alternatively, local businesses need a lot of help when it comes to marketing and advertising too. So you could hold regular educational seminars which you can use as a prospecting tool.
3) Community Groups
Community groups are a slight variation on seminars where you organize groups that meet regularly to discuss a specific topic or theme. Using the same examples as above you may form a knitting group or business networking group. In this case, you could charge a small membership fee for your time in organizing the group meetings and facilitating guest speakers and other conversation during the meetings.
While not typically included in most publishers strategy, offline events provide another way for publishers to increase their revenue while further engaging with the community thus reinforcing their role as a connector in the community.
Did we miss something? Let us know in the comments section below (and don’t forget to check back tomorrow for part 5).
