There are many ways to leverage your content to either make more money or get more traffic. If you’re CanWest Global, owners of the Vancouver Sun, The Province, plus countless other newspapers (not to mention TV and radio stations), you leverage your content by syndicating your articles to other newspapers that you own. And that is exactly what CanWest Global did.
Today, I made the business section of the National Post/Financial Post and Ottawa Citizen. I discovered this when a reader from Ottawa sent me an email about it. The National Post is a Canada wide newspaper so I was able to pick up a copy at the local 7-11 and make a scan (maybe someone in Ottawa can do a scan of the Ottawa Citizen for me). It is possible that my story will end up in other CanWest publications in the next few days. CanWest owns 11 English-language major metropolitan daily newspapers in Canada.
The body of the story is the same. However, the title of the story and the tag lines are changed. The original Vancouver Sun article had the title, “Part-time labour of love online brings in some cashâ€, the National Post went for a more sensational title, “Internet bucks; no effort”, and the Ottawa Citizen went with “Blogger’s ad scheme starts to click.” I’m not sure which title I like best. Which one do you like?
The added buzz from the old world media has helped to increase blog traffic. The impact isn’t as intense as a Digg or Slashdot but I say traffic is up 20% because of the newspaper coverage. I hope that traffic from a newspaper sticks around longer than a Digg. If you came here from a CanWest newspaper, please say hello. You can do so in the comments.