Arve Overland and Leo Chung of Overland Agency, Inc. gave an informative session called “How to Sell Your Website to Advertisers” during the 2007 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) Convention in Portland, Oregon.

Overland and Chung walked the room through the job of a media buyer; the intermediary responsible for purchasing online ads to meet specific advertisers needs.

My background is editorial, so I found this an especially helpful approach for understanding media buyers and how alternative newspapers can structure their websites to deliver value to advertisers.

Understand the process of buying online ads from a professional media buyer’s perspective, and then use that understanding to guide smaller clients into lasting relationships.

A media buyer’s job is to deliver a certain numerical goal to their client - a certain number of pageviews for a promotional site, or a certain number of coupon-downloads. Online advertising is all about stats - everything is measured, nothing is guesswork.

It is all math.

The media buyer needs to deliver 1,500 coupon downloads to their client.

About 1 percent of your site audience will click through the ad to the promotional site featuring the coupon. About 3 percent of those folks will download the coupon (that’s called a site conversion rate). [These percentages are garnered from industry standards, and then tweaked accordingly.]

To get 1,500 coupon downloads, they’ll need 50,000 people to visit the promotional site with the coupon. And since only 1 percent of your audience will click through, they will need their ad to be seen 5 million times in order to deliver the promised 1,500 coupon downloads to their client.

So, they need their ad seen 5 million times. If you can deliver that amount of pageviews within the campaign timeframe (Chung and Overland stated an average campaign lasted an month or so), then the media buyer will spend their client’s money advertising on your site.

A media buyer wants to spend their money wisely, so they are willing to spend a little more for a targeted audience that is more likely to click through to their promotional site - great news for alts, who can deliver local audiences passionate about specific issues.

By creating sections of your website that feature deep-well interest content, you can garner targeted audiences that your sales reps can help connect with interested advertisers. Putting together an “environmental news” section, for example, would be a great way to appeal to advertisers trying to reach environmentally-minded consumers.

4 Keys to Successfully Selling Your Site

Slide 29, Overland & Chung presentation
1. Understand Your Advertiser/Buyer

• They need to maximize return and show results against quantifiable goals
• Go beyond selling inventory and “space” to selling solutions

2. Communicate Your Website’s Value

• Demonstrate your local, demographic and flexibility advantage
• Leverage your unique position to differentiate and deliver relevance

3. Plan by the Numbers

• Every dollar is accountable and ROI drives online advertising
• Use the ROI model to price your products; demand more for what converts higher and understand what is driving an advertiser’s price pressure

4. Measure Results to Drive Sucess

• Data is key to success during the campaign as well as for on-going strategy and relationships
• Provide your advertisers with knowledge to improve their campaigns and results and they will come back

Stephanie Barna, editor of the Charleston City Paper, blogs her encounter with the Huffington Post guruess on editor.ccpblogs.com:

“I’m currently in Portland at the annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention where we’ve had a round-up of interesting speakers, from Arianna Huffington to Bill Hightower.

Unfortunately, I missed Huffington’s panel, but encountered her afterwards signing books. As she was inscribing my copy, she queried me on where I was from and asked if I was interested in “covering the races.” A bit flustered, all I could think of was, you know, the races - blacks, whites, etc. Being from Charleston, it was the first thing that popped into my head. But then I realized she meant election races. We exchanged cards and I quickly left to find some colleagues to tell me what the hell I had missed in the seminar. Turns out, she’s interested in altweeklies linking with the Huffington Post, enabling her site to become a hub for all the races across the country.”

It was thrilling to hear Todd Stauffer’s presentation this morning about getting our entertainment listings on the net, as Web objects, with landing pages and iPhone widgets. Of course he’s dead-on, and we should thank him for all the work he did to prepare a clear, compelling story. As Todd pointed out, after getting Sunday-punched by Craigslist and losing our personals franchise, some publishers are thinking about, possibly, not letting the same thing happen to our events calendars. (Did we get the plate number of the bus that hit us ? or the one that ran us over?)

His Powerpoint made me nostalgic, so I called up a presentation I made to the AAN board on the same subject a while back. Due to audio visual limitations, I couldn’t put it on screen, but here’s the cover page and an excerpt. Be sure to note the date on the report: October 27, 1993!

Click these two thumbnails to view:

The second Design & Production session on Thursday was a bit heavier than we’re used to, but it was a very important discussion on copyright infringement, primarily within the ad department.

Please note, the laws of each state varies, so these are just items to watch out for

The one most important thing I took away from the session is that we need to add some language to our advertising sales contract that releases us from whatever materials the client sends us… whether it be a full ad, or the photos that they send to us to build the ad for them.

For example, a bar advertiser wants to run an ad with a photo taken of someone in the bar. 1) they should have a photographer’s release saying that the photographer is giving us the rights to use the ad in the paper AND online (if we’re doing both), and 2) if there is anyone recognizable in the ad, a model’s release is needed to use his/her image for the bar to promote the bar’s business.

The first two items are things that the bar should be taking care of. We all know that it’s not going to happen (but we won’t admit that in court), so we have to protect ourselves by saying something like this in the advertising contract that “It is the understanding that the client will obtain all necessary permissions and rights for any materials submitted to the paper, as a a camera-ready ad, or the items needed to buiid the ad, and will not hold XXX paper responsible for non-compliance.”

Other questions to ask:
- Who owns the ad?
Camera-readys are simple. They are client-owned. Does the client own an ad that your production staff designs for them? This needs to be specified as well, especially if the client wants to run an ad that you designed for them in other publications. Watermarking .pdfs is a great tool to prevent this, or to at least find out where the ads are being sent to.

-Watch your “Events” shots/slideshows
Try and avoid publishing “outrageous” shots taken at your events. Even though they’re in a public place, you are still using someone’s image to promote your paper… law is a bit dicey here. Since you’re not going to get a model release for everyone you take a photo of at an event, you can put on your registration page that “photos will be taken and may be published on our website” blah blah blah

- Avoid use of professional sports team names in ads
It’s actually an infringement of trademark to say “We show all Mets and Yankees games.” What is allowed is “We show all New York baseball games.” You cannot say “Redskins vs. Cowboys,” but must say “Washington vs. Dallas.”

And don’t get me started on the Superbowl! The NFL has trademarks on “Superbowl Sunday” and “Super Sunday.” Get around this by saying “Big Game Sunday,” “Watch the Big Game,” or “Football Championships”

Also, avoid the use of team logos and professional logos (such as MLB, ESPN, NFL, etc). Most of the time, you can use text to say the same thing, but the logos themselves are protected.

- Santa Claus cannot sell booze
This is a personal addition that I forgot about. In DC, it’s actually illegal for images of Santa Claus (or the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc) to sell alcohol because it supposedly targets minors. Ads that have Santa Claus selling Budweiser are rejected. However, an attractive girl dressed in a Santa hat and red & white furry bra is completely different because it’s not the image normally associated with Mrs. Claus, but possibly that of their hot granddaughter or college co-ed tenant.

I asked Debra Silvestrin if I could have a booth next to Amy the Advice Goddess because I thought it would be fun, and maybe I would get some advice. (Dear Advice Goddess, why have so many of my ex-girlfriends become dykes?) But I did not realize how strategic a move it would turn out to be.

While the fun and advice were indeed flowing, I was also able to learn at the feet of a world-class schmoozer. As anyone who tried walking by her booth probably found out, it actually was not possible to walk by her booth. She says “Hi” the way a spider greets a fly, and even a single response tangles you in her net. I watched wide-eyed, and even managed to net a few of her leftovers, but it wasn?t long before the student became the master.

As some of you may have noticed, I brought a lot of food to my booth, hoping to bribe my food column into some more papers. I am happy to report that by day two the Advice Goddess had jumped on my bandwagon, so to speak, with a plate of cookies of her own.

We didn’t quite figure out why so many of my ex-girlfriends have jumped the fence, but we agreed it would have been hotter if I had waited until they had, and then dated them. We also agreed that she and I write about two of the most important things in the world.

When I donned my Michelangelo David apron, Amy suggested I get into television, which I think is Hollywoodspeak for “I want to get into your pants.” Maybe this means she wants to be a dyke.

The first session on Thursday was supposed to be 4 roundtables of 5-8 people each, with varying topics.

Since we’re often the non-conformists, we decided to do ONE roundtable of about 30 people, which spurred lots of comments from everyone in the room (not just the people who were supposed to moderate the topics):

- Hire a photography intern, especially if you don’t have a staff photographer.
Tons of college students with powerful digicams are looking for portfolio pieces and some practical experience. Have them go on the photoshoots your regular staff photographer doesn’t want to do (if you have one) or weed through the hundreds of photos, discarding the blurry or poor shots. Your Art Director will thank you later.

- Do regular post-mortems.
Do ONE for editorial design, so designers and editors can collaborate on if the concept was or was not followed through.
Do another for production & sales (Ad Sales Directors, REQUIRE your sales staff to participate once a month). This is a great way to spec out a lot of the poorly designed camera-ready ads that are being submitted. Personal note: we do this in DC at Washington City Paper, and we have more than an 80% close on print spec ads, and a 90% close on web specs)

- UNPAID interns
Use ‘em, especially for special issues or “best ofs…”. Many interns who are journalism students are also looking to learn the basics of design, simply because it will make them better candidates for a future job, or an editorial position later in life. They also get a chance to build a professional portfolio, giving them a leg up on those students who only have classroom pieces.

- Spec ads
must be sales driven, but compensate the production staff for when the ads sell. Many papers are offering a $10-$25 PER closed spec as compensation for the new business.

- Create a production training manual, especially if you find that you have high turnover.
Include the job descriptions of each title in the department (which encourages entry-level staffers a chance to strive for a “senior” position), and a daily breakdown of “what to do.” Hell, even throw in a glossary for those terms that may not be common to people outside the office like “camera-ready” or “pickup/repeater”. New staffers, primarily those who begin at the start of a production cycle, are not able likely to be trained properly at the beginning, and it gives them something more constructive to do than surf the web or try and “help” other staff out when deadlines are looming.

- ENFORCE strict sales deadlines.
If you find that the sales staff are increasingly missing their deadlines and encroaching on the day where you’re sending pages to the printer, pull back the deadlines or enforce them. The day that pages are sent to the printer SHOULD be the first day of the sales cycle for the next week, giving them more time to sell. If an ad rep is worrying about proofs or getting ads in on the printer deadline day, their selling cycle is a day behind, since everything should already be approved.

- Email or leave a voicemail for late ads
beginning on the day the paper is mapped. There’s nothing wrong with a little public humiliation, especially if it’s the same offenders each week.

- Require signatures for late additions/deletions from the publisher or ad sales director.
They will always sign off on these, but at least they will see which reps are causing problems each week.

- Institute a maximum number of times an advertiser can change an ad during their contract,
especially if your department is designing it. We all know that it takes a few weeks to gain a response, and changing the ads each week won’t necesarily get that response for the client. Help the rep to try and focus NOT on specials that change every week (unless the specials are REALLY good), but focus more on the benefit of the business.

- Institute the “Favor Book.”
If all else fails, and you are swamped each week by late ads and mistakes that are booked, this handly little tool may help. Each ad rep’s name is listed in a ledger in your office. For each late add/delete/change, unnecessary round of corrections, etc, you put a little tally mark next to their name. Once it hits five, the rep owes you doughnuts. If they are very bad in a week, and hit 10, they owe you pizza. Fifteen and they owe you pizza and beer. Once they pay up, remove the appropriate number of tally marks. Once they hit a benchmark (5, 10 or 15), their name goes on a board out in the production dept. and remains there until they pay up. If you get pushback on this, you can remind them that the commission on 5 late ads you got into the paper and the increased revenue for the paper AND the goodwill with the clients will more then make up for $10 worth of doughnuts, or $25 for pizza and beer. And NO CHEATING on the rep’s side by charging it back to the paper!

Multi-tasking… it’s something that a production director does extremely well. However, I’m feeling a bit behind schedule so right now, so I’m listening to Senator Ron Wyden talk about his ideal health care plan, eating a breakfast of Voodoo doughnuts and coffee, and beginning on the blog entries that I should have started two days ago.

So, on to the multi-tasking… I think the AAN convention has been an overall success so far. The Design and Production track has had some really strong programming, and we’ve had a lot of interaction within those meetings. That’s really the formula to a successful session… the interaction. Starting off this way allowed us to break the ice between strangers and friends, and small papers and large.

We all obviously have issues, but knowing that our issues are common struggles set the tone for some great collaboration, and gave us come contacts to solve those issues in the coming months.

I’ll be posting a blog on as many of the D&P sessions as I can, so stay tuned.

Well, it is Saturday morning and I am up too early. But before I head back to bed, this is the perfect time to recap Friday.

1. Podcast Seminar by Al Stavitsky: While I would like to consider myself pretty tech savvy, I know little about podcasts. For example, the term refers to any audio or video file that can be distributed on the Internet, not just something affiliated with an IPod. The part that most interested me (i.e. ca-ching!) is the idea of getting local sponsors for podcasts from the editorial department.

2. Web Metrics Something Something by the Overland Agency: This was quite useful from the sales side. I can always use advice on how to talk to agencies especially since online media buying is handled quite differently from a traditional agency model. Also, Arve Overland mentioned a concept that I love: Digital Immigrants vs. Digital Natives. The idea is that those of us in Generations Y and X, the Baby Boomers and so forth are immigrants to the digital age. The new generations are natives; they were born into a digital world of media on demand, MP3s, TiVo etc. I am 31 and the way I think about media is completely obsolete. I’m screwed when the robots take over.

3. Wed Sales Panel: There?s money in them there sites! And I want it.

4. Rooftop Reception at Wieden + Kennedy: That fancy-schmancy party was fun! I’d like to thank and congratulate my colleague, Kendra Clune, for organizing the event- it was fantastic! I met some lovely people and fueled by several gin and tonics, expounded the virtues of our fair city and our fair paper. WW Represent!

It is time for bed, part II. I need to rest up for the Tram Party.

Thanks to Al for sharing his presentation.

Lifted utterly without permission from KevinAllman.Typepad.com, the blog of relocated New Orleans>Portland writer/editor.

By Kevin Allman

“Went to the second day of the AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference this afternoon, mostly to hear the “Covering Elections” panel. Okay, the title wasn’t a dazzler, but the panel was: Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post (and a million chat shows); Matt Taibbi, whose coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign got me reading Rolling Stone again for the first time in years; and Jane Hamsher, Hollywood muckamuck turned muckraker on her blog Firedoglake. (The moderator was Mark Zusman, editor-in-chief of Willamette Week, which had kindly provided the credentials.)

At a time when blogs are threatening to eat the alt-weeklies’ lunch and give them a wedgie to boot (Hamsher claimed, for instance, that her site got 200,000 visitors a day during the Scooter Libby trial), I would’ve thought the room would be packed: how did these people spin electrons into gold? And how do they make money at it? Really surprising to see a smallish ballroom only 3/4 filled for the event.

And Huffington and Taibbi were fantastic — funny, self-deprecating, smart. Describing what her blog is all about, Huffington got the crowd laughing when she said “We don’t make it up. It’s real news. We’re not Fox.”

One thing all three agreed on: It’s not just the electoral process that’s broken; it’s the way elections are covered that’s equally screwed-up. “A campaign doesn’t reflect real issues,” Taibbi said. “It’s a fraud, a reality show. The media will invent some ‘deficiency’ in a candidate, and then the candidate will spend all his time trying to correct that perceived deficiency.” Huffington: “Looking at politics from a left/right lens is obsolete…and it has been a disastrous way of looking at American politics.” Yes and yes.

But what to do about it?

One solution Huffington has devised, with the help of NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, is a new form of coverage they’re calling “Off the Bus”. Rosen:

So instead of one well-placed reporter trailing John Edwards wherever he goes (which is one way of doing it) some 40 or 50 differently-placed people tracking different parts of the Edwards campaign, all with peculiar beats and personal blogs linked together by virtue of having a common editor and a page through which the best and most original stuff filters out to the greater readership of the Web, especially via the Huffington Post.

I have no idea if it’ll work (and that’s a horrible sentence, Jay Rosen!), but I’m glad to see somebody trying something besides standard pool reportage, or Chris Matthews gabbling for an hour with a panel of self-styled “experts.” Anything to break the grip of what Taibbi correctly called the “reality show.”

What does all this mean for alt-newsweeklies, which are notoriously short-staffed? Reality show — hell, they’re operating on public access.

I don’t know; they don’t have the deep pockets of an MSM outlet like The Washington Post, nor do they have an army of worker ants like the one Huffington and Rosen are assembling. I think their best bet is to keep a laser focus on the local side of things, and, if there are talented bloggers in their towns, tap into their knowledge and enthusiasm. (But, for God’s sake: pay them.)”