A Notification Strategy for Blogs and News Websites

If you run a blog or news website, creating content is possibly the easiest part of the job. The challenge is to get your posts and articles in front of the people who form your target market. With the reams of information added to the Web each day, it isn’t easy to reach a sizeable audience.

And then there’s the need to create engagement–likes, shares, comments–once you’ve got the pageviews. Actions taken while on a webpage are the first signs of a loyal community forming around the things you create.

A number of media outlets have begun to leverage notifications as a way to get their audience to engage more actively with their websites. Here are a few ways in which you can develop a notification strategy for blogs and news websites. 

Breaking News Notifications

Whether on TV or the Internet, nothing grabs the attention of the masses like a good old breaking news story. Combining a juicy developing story with a timely notification is an easy way to generate a spike in pageviews, and it’s something the biggest media companies in the world do. The BBC mentions push notifications as one of the ways in which it delivers updates on breaking stories to its readership. Such alerts are a no-brainer since timing them is easy and readers tend not to feel like they’re an intrusion given the nature of the story.

Related Stories Notifications

As much as one can tap breaking news to bump up pageviews, sensational things don’t happen enough for it to be the only strategy in use. There are also outlets out there that don’t rely on publishing news pieces. In such cases, publications can take advantage of notifications about related stories to lead readers through a breadcrumb trail on their website. This is especially easy to do if your outlet publishes evergreen content. You can use a number of plug-and-play options to notify your user about related stories.

Subscription Offers Notifications

More and more media companies are making the shift towards putting their content behind a paywall. Some of the top publications in the world including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wired give readers a few free stories each month before requiring a subscription. Websites that rely on paid models can leverage notifications in a variety of ways to drive purchases. For example, they can be used to alert users of the number of free articles they have left in a month. Blogs can deliver notifications to get more signups for their email newsletters. Executed the right way, a notification strategy for blogs and news websites can have a positive effect on revenues.

Engagement Triggers Notifications

Marketers love nothing more than a highly engaged community online. There are a host of ways in which notifications can be used to get users to interact in more immersive ways with your content online. For example, blogs can use notifications to inform readers about responses to their comments on posts. Social media metrics are growing in importance, so you can incentivize your readers to share posts on other platforms using push notifications. You can get really creative with how you use notifications to nudge your audience to take certain actions while they consume your content.

Those are just a few ways in web and app notifications can benefit your blog or news website. Visit Notific.io to find out how you create a notification system for your website in a minute flat.