The SNO Report: Exit Paths and Fluffy Stuff

We know your newspaper staff are hard hitting journalists, for sure. They’re covering the tough stuff, and with the current political climate, there’s no shortage of tough stuff. They’re on scene, asking all the questions, and keeping the public informed. And that’s awesome.

But it’s almost spring, and that means stories about prom, and graduation, and class trips, and all of that. The fluffy stuff! And we’re willing to bet that if you looked at your site analytics (and you should), you’d find that a lot of traffic actually comes from the fluffy stuff. And that’s totally cool, too. Another cool thing? You can use fluffy, high interest pieces to drive traffic and keep readers on your site. Think: exit paths.

Exit paths are avenues suggested by you, to your reader, to other content they might enjoy. And there a few ways to do it.

Story Scroll Bar: The Story Scroll Bar is a horizontal bar of story suggestions including thumbnails and titles, and you can apply it to the top of your home page, or the bottom of your story pages, or neither, or both! Any way you choose to do it, you can decide what category shows up in the Story Scroll Bar, and you can choose a dark or light background.

Side Rails Template: The Side Rails story page template is a great way to suggest content to your readers. You can add a left-hand side rail to any story page you want, and you can suggest content based on tag, category, or author. You can add thumbnail photos or not, and you’ve got tons of control over what shows up and how.

“Related Stories” SNO Story Element: SNO Story Elements are fun and add visual interest to your stories, and you can add them to any story you want, place them anywhere within your story, and base them on any keyword you can think of. Try it! It’s a super cool way to keep readers engaged and clicking on your awesome content.

Pro-tip: Hyperlinks are a great way to add broader context to your local stories, and you can totally hyperlink your own stories, too, so your reader can keep up with all your killer coverage.

Join us for SNODrift

Here’s a reminder to join us for our weekly webinar series, SNODrift – if you’ve got 30 minutes to spare, you can join us at 2 p.m. CST on Thursday to learn all about category landing pages. To join, simply follow this link.