It’s easy to forget the lots and lots of people still read things printed on paper. And they might be people who should know about your blog. Josh Catone at Read Write Web wrote about a small New Zealand blog, The Flying Pickle, that boosted its audience (and ad revenue) with a printed digest of their best posts.
“There are literally millions of blogs, but only a few get any readership. Trying to attract the local population to your blog may be a very difficult task. Trying to make them participate is even harder,” writes ZetaPrints, who believe that the print edition was a key to success for the Flying Pickle. Each week the blog selects its best posts and prepares them in a A5-sized, newsletter that it then places in letterboxes in the three local communities it targets. The total population for the area the blog serves is about 6,500.
Very quickly, the blog saw participation grow to about 6% of the local population and comments on the posts increased. Initially, the blog drafted volunteers from its core audience to help distribute the newsletter, but they have since switched to paid, professional distribution.
There is something compelling about content printed on paper you can hold in your hand. When you’re thinking about how to get people to look at your web content, don’t forget that they don’t live on the web all day long.
Photo by Looking Glass, reproduced under Creative Commons license.