Not so Dead Content

If you keep a tab on what people read and don't read, then you'll be able to find out what your most valuable content is. This isn't just a simple "10.000 read that article and 400 read that article", since that last article might have been written when the site was young and you only had 400 subscribers. You need to keep an eye on market penetration. The market is your subscribers, and the penetration is the percentage of subscribers who have read an article. This also have to be numbers used at the time of publication.

So, what if we have the above two articles? If your site has 20 000 subscribers, then the second article, read by only 400 people, is the article with the best market penetration, 100%, vs. 50% on the newer article. You also know that 19 600 people haven't read that old article. The obvious solution is to link to that old article! Now you have something which hopefully most of your readers will appreciate, which they haven't already read, and which didn't cost you extra.

Furthermore, perhaps the article needs brushing up? Have there been later developments? Could it need a rewrite? Well, consider both, and when you have that new article up, link to the old article from that. Keeping up with developments also show that you're interested in what you write, not only for its immediacy or current popularity, but also unto the more longer lasting issues of the writings. This is valuable for your image, it builds your image, gives your readers some indication of what you do, like and care about. In short it is part of building yourself as a brand.

You might also receive reader feedback on a piece, this can shed some light on a story, and might justify another followup. Reader feedback is important, it tells you what people like and dislike. A good article might merit a discussion in your forums, it might be that this will elicit even more reader feedback.

Also, keeping a tab on current discussions on your site might be insightful when judging what your audience care about. If there are particularly fierce discussions going on, you need to grab hold of them and write something about it, bringing more people into it.

By enabling discussions connected directly to articles you can also spur more usage of your site. Expanding on that theme you could add polls to the article as well, which can further discussion when people see the results.

And how about adding subscriptions to specific events, categories and articles? If people reads an article they might be interested in getting notices when there are follow ups to the original. Use the knowledge gained to your advantage.

Word of mouth is also a good thing for your articles, you should add "tip a friend" functionality to your main parts of the site. Then a reader can easily add an e-mail address and send that article to a friend. Note, this method might be forbidden in some countries.

Sometimes an article might not be a clear cut sports article or politics, it might belong to different categories. Cross posting to relevant categories on your site might bring the article to the attention of people who might otherwise overlook the article.

The front page, or main section pages might also be a good place for that article which you want to spotlight. You might also create a "most popular" list based on penetration of the articles you have. Thus the articles which were valuable to your users will appear high on that list.

Finally, there might be articles you've written which didn't work at all. Try a rewrite, find a better hook, a different angle, something which will draw people in.