BusinessWeek's online strategy

Mark Glaser of MediaShift looks Wednesday at BusinessWeek.com‘s strategy to increase its traffic.

Glaser wrote, “As of last August, BusinessWeek.com was ranked #13 in unique visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, below Motley Fool and above Financial Times. So how can the old-school publication, published since 1929 by McGraw-Hill, get noticed online when it has to go up against the high-trafficked portals and daily content of the Wall Street Journal and Reuters? The site’s executive editor, John Byrne, told me one of his top goals was to create deeper, more meaningful engagement for his online audience with more blogs, audio podcasts, video reports and aggregating outside content.

“After trying to wall off some of its online content for paid subscribers only, BusinessWeek.com changed course and redesigned its site over the past year with an eye on usability and reader interaction. Byrne says that his internal traffic numbers from Omniture show a record half-billion page views for the site in 2007, including 8.9 million unique visitors in October, as well as a soaring number of comments on stories and blog posts.

“The site now has 18 blogs and 22 audio podcasts, and a feature called Executive Summary that aggregates outside news sources to give a snapshot of the day’s global business news. The site definitely has a cleaner look, but will all that new online-only content really give BusinessWeek.com a chance to catch the portals’ huge business audiences? And how can the site stand out in the crowd of financial sites online?”

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