Building an online readership base

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how one of the business magazine’s bloggers, Anthony Kosner, has seen his readership go from 40,000 to 400,000 a month.

Dvorkin writes, “Today, Anthony is a believer in our evolving model for incentive-based, entrepreneurial journalism. He uses words like ‘machine’ and ‘addictive’ to describe our publishing platform. In an email exchange after our video interview, he said: ‘What is so gratifying about the FORBES platform is that it rewards the quality of your content. Quantity, timing, relevance and engagement with social media help to make the most of that quality, and in some ways constitute that quality. But it’s much more than a numbers game. On FORBES you don’t have to shout or canoodle to get heard. You just have to write great headlines that are supported by great stories that are about subjects that people actually care about.’

“Our contributors, all hand-picked by our editors, need to have angles, or beats, that fall within one of our key topic channels. It’s largely their responsibility to attract and build an audience and engage with their community, or followers. I love to talk with contributors to see how they’re doing. Many are getting it, some remain a bit frustrated. Few have given up. Anthony writes about Web and app developers and the new products they bring to market. To be honest, I find it a little unfocused at times, but he’s certainly building an audience. Last month, he had more 400,000 unique visitors, up from the 40,000 he was struggling to maintain early on.

“What clicked for Anthony? ‘At the highest level, I think I was bitten with the challenge and made a commitment to myself to do more and better. So that made me really look at which posts were getting the most attention and try to understand what had legs and why.’ Anthony says that meant figuring out the intersection points of two dynamics: the news cycle and waves of social media.”

Read more here.