First Edition
How to Optimize Your
Paper.li Newspaper
Jeremiah Wright
NOW Marketing Group
1
What is Paper.li
Anyway?
“Newspapers cannot be defined by
the second word—paper. They’ve
got to be defined by the first word
—news.”
– Arthur Sulzbert, Jr
What is Paper.li?
The first question you might be asking yourself is how to pronounce Paper.li. Indeed, we’ve
called it both “Paper-Dot-L-Eye” and “Paper Lee” here at NOW. Per their website, the official
pronunciation of the platform is “pay-per-lee”.
1
Great, so now we can pronounce it, but what is Paper.li? Simply put, Paper.li is a digital
newspaper platform delivered daily, twice daily, or weekly to your social media subscribers as
well as your e-newsletter database. It curates content from the sources and topics you select,
providing your readers with relevant news and insight from across the web.
Paper.li can be set up easily, using either your Facebook or Twitter log in. For the purposes of a
business publication, I highly recommend using your business or professional Twitter profile
credentials. Even if the newspaper is being published as if its coming from an individual, I would
still recommend using your Twitter log in vs. Facebook for the ease of use factor.
Once your account is created, Paper.li will ask you to name your first newspaper, give it a
description, and then begin to curate sources. But before you dive right in, let’s talk a bit about
how you can use this platform effectively.
Buyer Personas: Every marketing action you take should be based around your buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. Buyer Personas share
common attributes such as behavior, goals, pain points and basic demographic information. They
are not specific people or target markets.
Take this brief hypothetical example: Assume that you are the marketing director for a mediumsized company that develops productivity software. Who would be your Buyer Persona? You
probably have a few, but lets assume two of them are Manager Mike, from a Fortune 500
company, and Jim, an office worker who uses your software at work but is looking for a reason to
buy it for his home.
Both buyer personas have different reasons for needing your software, and your marketing
efforts should be tailored appropriately so. This is where the power of Paper.li comes into play:
You have the ability to set up 10 different newspaper per account -- so you can customize each
newspaper to speak to your respective buyer personas.
So while you may be ready to sign in and begin publishing, take a step back and decide to whom
it is you will be marketing. Manager Mike’s reason for purchasing your product will be distinctly
different than Jim’s. And because both of these buyer personas have given you their permission
to include them on your e-newsletter distribution list, you will want to tailor each newspaper to
best speak to them.
Some of the content may be the same, and we’ll dive into how to set up the best mix of sources
in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. But for now, ask yourself how many buyer personas you will be
marketing to, what stage of the buying process they are in, and begin to visualize in your mind
what that person will want to know. The goal here is to position your company as the expert in
2
your particular field, and it’s o.k. to curate content from your competitors too. Remember, you’re
simply providing your readers with content publicly available via social media channels -- you’re
not selling to them nor are you selling against your competition.
Paper.li comes in two options: A free version or a paid $9 per month, per publication version. For
the purposes of inbound marketing and reaching your specific buyer personas, I highly
recommend the paid $9 version. The branding and customization options available at that level
alone are more than outweighed by the minimal price tag.
As a consumer, you can easily search for and subscribe to publications via the Newsstand button
at the top of their website. As a marketer, you can embed your newspaper directly into your
website via iFrame. As a CEO, you can have your marketing team set up a newspaper to
specifically pull in content from your competitors so you can stay on top of what they are talking
about.
Simply put, this a powerful, low-cost platform that, when utilized properly, can take your inbound
strategy to the next level.
3
2
Setting up your
account
“Create your own visual style... let it
be unique for yourself and yet
identifiable for others.”
– Orson Welles
Time to get creative
This chapter will make the assumptions that you’ve decided to go with the paid $9 option for your
first newspaper. Go ahead and sign in with your Twitter credentials. The next step is to verify your
email (I use the same email that I set up my Twitter account with). I like to minimize the amount
4
of emails I receive, so I uncheck the box to give Paper.li permission to email me with tips and
updates (you can opt in later).
Now, it’s time to create your first paper. When you select this option, it will give you two buttons to
click: A “1 click” newspaper based on your Twitter account and a customized option. For now, use
the “1 click” button as our goal in this chapter is to solidify the look and feel of your newspaper -not fine tune sources.
Assuming that you’re following along step by step: Congratulations! You just published the first
edition of your digital newspaper! The content should look very familiar to you -- it’s basically the
links from your Twitter timeline in an e-newspaper form. Once you set up multiple newspapers,
you’ll be able to view each publication by selecting it under the “Your Favorites” tab.
Your first step should be to upgrade to Pro: Click on your Twitter icon on the upper right hand
side of the paper, and select “Paper Settings.” The “Upgrade to Pro” option should be on your
upper right-hand side: Go ahead and follow the steps to upgrade to “Pro.”
There are various options we’ll tackle in this chapter, including the Settings, Appearance, Add
Ons, and Ad Units tabs.
SETTINGS
Click on your Settings tab. It’s here that you can edit the Subtitle/Description
that you wrote in your initial setup of your newspaper. You can also insert an
editor’s note here -- a personalized note to your readers.
The Publishing Schedule is also selectable via this tab; you can change the
frequency (Daily, 2x Daily, or Weekly) as well as when (day / time) you will
publish your newspaper.
Custom Domain and iFrame options are also available, however, for the
purposes of this e-book they will not be covered.
APPEARANCE
I’ll be honest and say I have yet to change any of the fonts for any of the
publications I’ve set up -- I actually really like the default ones that Paper.li selects. Nevertheless,
it is here you can change your fonts for the newspaper title, article titles, and articles themselves.
5
Click on Branding under appearance. Because you are on the paid option,
you can upload a banner akin to a Facebook Cover Photo. You can use any
size really, but the optimal size is 1,170 x 1,100. This will go a long way to
giving your newspaper its own look and feel.
You can also select your own background image on this menu, with that
optimal size being 1,280 x 800; alternatively, you can select a color using
your pantone scheme here instead of an image.
Lastly, don’t forget your paper icon itself; I currently use my Twitter profile
photo, although the optimal size is 268 x 181.
You can even have custom paper styles, available under the custom tab.
We’ll talk about editing the CSS in Chapter 7, but don’t
forget to upload your Favicon on this tab before you
move on. Personally, I almost always turn off the Paper.li header and
footers here too, though you may have a specific reason for leaving them
on.
AD UNITS
Scroll down to Ad Units. Here is where you can do a couple of cool things:
a) Turn off ads all together b) Upload custom ads for others to advertise on
your platform C) use these as Calls to Action for your inbound marketing or
D) Go crazy, and insert video or even Facebook feeds. A few of my clients
have even used these to post “Help Wanted” ads. It is
more helpful to think of this section as “Widgets”, and
we’ll cover the Video integration in Chapter 4.
ADD ONS
Finally, click on Add Ons. Here you can embed your Twitter feed directly
onto your newspaper’s main page. For the clients I’ve done this with, it
seems to take their publication to a whole new level. We tweet photos, and
while Paper.li won’t necessarily always pull those in, having the feed
embedded will guarantee they’ll be a part of your publication. To get this
widget code, simply to to Settings -> Widgets on Twitter while still signed in
and follow the on-screen steps to create your widget. Once it generates the
code, just copy/paste it back into Paper.li here and it instantly will embed
your feed into your newspaper’s front page.
6
3
Sources
“Things don’t have to change the
world to be important.”
– Steve Jobs
If at first you don’t succeed...
...just “Fetch New Content”! Okay, I’m probably a few steps ahead of where we are right now with
that statement, but I’ll come back to it in a bit.
7
Just as every action with Inbound Marketing is defined by your Buyer Persona, every part of your
e-newspaper will revolve around your Sources tab. Once your newspaper’s design is set up, the
real work begins.
Sources is available under your Content tab and it’s here you will decide who you will be curating
content from -- whether your own stories, national brands applicable to your audience, or local
experts.
Ultimately, it’s going to take time and effort to determine the correct mix of sources. Through trial
and error, here are some tips I’ve discovered:
•Facebook integration is not fully optimized as of this publication
•Twitter will be your top referral
•Twitter lists should be your top source
•Sources should be listed, from top to bottom, in two ways
•Your most trusted sources at the top
•Frequent tweeters, even if they are a highly trusted source, should be moved lower in
the priority list or removed as a source and instead included in a Twitter list. Otherwise,
you’ll turn your newspaper into a summary of their content almost exclusively.
•Twitter handles of your local newspaper can help curate some amazing content. However,
you’re going to want to filter out specific keywords. If the focus of your publication is on
healthcare reform, police reports really have no place in your newspaper. You can filter out
those words by clicking on the icon you see here, and then entering your filtered words here
in the pull-down menu.
This is also a good time to point out that your mix of sources and filters applied to those sources
should be reflective of content applicable to your Buyer Persona. Does Salesperson Sam care
about healthcare reform as much as Manager Molly? If not, consider creating separate Paper.li
newspapers to specifically speak to their buyer persona.
Earlier in this chapter I referenced Fetching New Content. Lets assume that your newspaper
publishes every 7 a.m. Friday you have your settings in such a way that the e-newsletter
(Chapter 5) will not send to your subscribers until you manually send out notification. When you
log in to review your newspaper before sending out notifications, you notice that one of our
8
sources is completely dominating this week’s issue. Sure, you can click on the Edit button and
delete / move stories around.
Alternatively, you can go into your Sources and reorder them. Move the source dominating your
newspaper down by clicking on the three lines next to the source’s Twitter icon and dragging it
further down on the list. Save your changes and depending on where you are click “Fetch New
Content”.
This will replace the current edition of your newspaper with a completely new version of it. The
old edition is gone -- permanently. If you have added photos or videos (Chapter 4), deleted
stories, or made content your featured story (Chapter 5), all of chose changes will be gone with
the new version.
Ultimately, you can keep changing your edition right up to the next publishing date. This can be
handy if you publish daily and can’t quite get to your computer to review that morning’s edition at
your regular publishing time and have to check it later that evening.
One final consideration: What topics do you want to cover? Paper.li will select most of the topics
available for you by default. As with the sources you pull from, keep your Buyer Persona in mind
when selecting your topics. Politics probably wouldn’t play too heavily into a sports-themed
newspaper, unless we’re talking about the President’s March Madness brackets. The beauty is
that you can select all topics, see what kind of content is generating by that topic for that current
issue, and if it doesn’t apply -- just uncheck it and fetch a new edition.
I want to emphasis that last part. If you uncheck a topic after an issue is published, it will remain
in that edition unless you Fetch New Content -- and that carries across for all content-related
changes. If you’re trying to modify your current issue, make sure you fetch a new issue after
making your source changes and filters. Going back to something I stated earlier, it’s going to be
a case of trial and error. It took roughly a month for some of my client’s newspapers to autogenerate in such a way to fit their Buyer Persona without having to make any manual changes.
Think of it like a puzzle: If I put this piece here, how will the final product turn out? Eventually, it
will all fit together and you’ll have a well-organized e-newspaper ready for subscribing!
9
4
Photos and Video
“Photos can strike an emotional
chord and can make people
connect to, and fall in love with
your brand.”
– Anonymous
How can I get my own content into this thing?
As the Brand Manager for my clients, I saw Paper.li initially as a way to create a solid enewsletter as we transitioned away from other newsletter marketing services. The problem I
encountered early on is that photos just didn’t look right. I was stumped because everything else
was so perfect with this service for their needs. It wasn’t until I really began digging deep,
10
creating prototypes and trying different sources, that I realized that Paper.li’s method of creating
e-newsletters was significantly different than other services.
But once we made it through the learning curve, it helped me to be a better marketer for them.
So, how do you get your photos into your e-newspaper? The easiest way is to post them through
Twitter directly. That will guarantee that, as long as you have the Photos topic selected, your
tweeted photos will appear in some context within the publication.
But the caption, your 116-character explanation of the photo, will be lost. That’s o.k. if you’re
tweeting out a photo with text already in it, but sometimes we want to tweet out a picture of E.T.
and say something akin to “Welcome our newest team member!” Or in the case of the photo you
see next to E.T., well, I’m sure you’re wondering what you’re even looking at exactly.
Now, don’t get me wrong in that these photos don’t have their use. They do -- those that know
our company are probably already familiar with what is going on here with these, and rather than
edit them out of the edition we’ll leave them in because it showcases the spirit of our company.
However, the photo to the left of E.T. could use a bit of context. This photo was taken at a
seminar we attended and tweeted out a small caption about. In order to turn this into a story that
Paper.li would recognize though, as it turns out, we should really turn this into a blog article.
Think about other kinds of e-newsletters you receive. Usually, some kind of photo followed by a
two-to-three-3 paragraph write up -- right?
Here’s the deal: Paper.li looks for links. That is probably the single most important thing I hope
you take away from this. You can still have the same kind of e-newsletter stories within your
newspaper, but you should host the content on a blog and tweet out a link to the blog article (and
make sure the relevant photo is included).
11
And when I say blog, I’m not necessarily referring to a traditional blog either that you would use
for your inbound marketing campaign (although you could). Rather, I’m referring to a simple
“unpublished link” type of blog that you can log into, write up your simple story associated with
the photo (just as you would do normally via other e-newsletter platforms) -- and then tweet out
that link. As long as your Twitter handle is the top source, you just guaranteed that your
traditional e-newsletter article just made it into your publication.
But there is a distinct difference here. Rather than read the full article via email, the reader will
only get a small snippet of the write up -- with the rest of it hosted on your website. You still get
the inbound traffic despite the non-traditional article!
Does this mean you’ll never send out a normal picture again via Twitter? No. As I stated, those
photos still represent the spirit of your company. For the ones that don’t provide context by
themselves, just edit them out before sending email notifications.
O.k., so what if you have a photo such as the one referenced earlier, and a three-to-four
sentence blog post just doesn’t make sense. That’s okay. As an alternative, you can set your
photo as one of your ads (remember, by having the Pro account you can turn off ads, sell ad
space, or use it for photos). Just use some basic photo editing software, insert your photo with
the caption into that software, save it as a file all together -- and insert it as an “Ad.”
This method won’t make it into your emailed version, but for those who click through and visit
your publication on Paper.li’s website, they will see it there. I’d use this method for minor photos.
Videos
Videos can also be a part of your e-newspaper as well as its e-newsletter version -- and actually,
click throughs via the email will take them directly to the source (such as your YouTube Channel).
Clicks on Paper.li’s website will create a small popup window where the video will play (although
the user can still click on the YouTube icon to go watch it on that platform rather than Paper.li)
So how do you get these into your e-newspaper? Actually, it’s pretty simple -- although I don’t
necessarily think you need to do all three of these methods (although you could, and I’ll explain
why in a minute).
The first is to add it as a Source: Meaning, add your YouTube channel (or others) as a Source.
New uploads will automatically appear in the next issue.
The second, and what I usually do, is simply tweet out a link to your new video. Because it’s a
link, Paper.li will pull this in as a story under the Videos topic (assuming, again, that you have it
selected).
12
The third method involves using your Ad Units. Pick a video from your YouTube channel, and
click the “Share” button, and then the “Embed” option. Copy this code and go back to your
Paper.li Ad Units menu. Click on the Edit icon on the right hand side.
Now, click on Custom and paste in the embed code from YouTube. Change the dimensions of
the video to 310 to 233 -- I’ve found these to be the optimal size. Now click Validate, then Save
Changes, and now your video is now embedded as a part of your e-newspaper.
13
We actually use all three methods on our newspaper. After all, videos being playable within your
publication takes your e-newspaper to the next level -- this is a setting you’ll want to mess with
and see what works best for your brand.
14
5
Make it an
e-Newsletter
“Congress shall make no law.....
abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press;”
– 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States of America
e-Newsletter or e-Newspaper?
I come from a print background. I’ll always have a strong respect and appreciation for ink printed
on broadsheets and delivered to your front doorstep each morning. The industry got me to where
I am today, and I am grateful for the experience I obtained there.
15
That being said, digital newspapers such as Flipboard and Paper.li are going to be the eventual
distribution method. It may not happen for several more years, maybe even decades, but digital
is the future. Paper.li looks just like a traditional broadsheet, and probably one of my favorite
things about this platform is that you can access your favorites from an iPad or another tablet
device and it looks and feels like you’re holding the front page of a traditional print newspaper -just with a modern flair.
But I’ve made enough references in this e-book so far that it should be obvious that there is an enewsletter option as well. It’s one of the coolest Pro features because of the level of
customizability -- and the ease with which you can send out e-newsletter versions of the website
e-newspaper.
The image on the preceding page is what I would define as your most likely default settings. The
biggest mistake I made was not sliding On to “Show paper banner in email” -- that really helps
brand your e-newsletter.
I like how you can include a custom subject field and on a few of mine I do.
One of my co-worker’s also pointed out that you can include Calls to Action within the “Add a
message” option. A client of her’s was hiring and we placed an ad on their Paper.li. To get this
into the email version, simply include a Call to Action that that you are hiring and “to learn more
visit....” (website, Paper.li, etc) within this message box.
See that green button in the image at the start of this chapter? This is where I have made
multiple references throughout this publication on Sending Notifications after you’ve made edits /
Fetched New Content. With this option turned on, you gain the ability to make edits and changes
before it is distributed to your reader’s inboxes.
One final note: with the send e-newsletters button on, you also have the ability to export the
HTML code from Paper.li -- or simply preview how it will look via email before it sends.
These options alone more than justify the $9 monthly price tag to me, but turn the page to talk
about the free version...
16
6
What about the free
version?
“Marketing is no longer about the
stuff that you make, but about the
stories you tell.”
– Seth Godin
The value of $9
At the suggestion of a co-worker, I’m including this chapter to talk about the differences between
the Pro and the Free versions of Paper.li. To this point, everything in this e-book has been based
around the concept of the Pro version. In this chapter, I will highlight the specific features that are
17
not available on the free version. My purpose here is to allow the reader to decide on their own
whether the options you receive as a part of the paid Pro version justify the $9 expense.
I personally have a free version for my running blog. However, at the moment I do not have the
readership on my blog nor the time to update it frequently enough to consider it a brand -- yet.
However, I could justify setting up a Paper.li simply for when I am able to start updating and
posting more frequently -- and at that moment I’ll convert it to Pro.
The first thing you’ll notice as far as on Paper.li itself is the lack of a banner image. Also, Paper.li
will run its own ads on your page.
In terms of the Settings, there are several Publishing and Export options that I did not cover that
are not available for free users (see below).
Under Email and Notifications, Notification control as well as the option to publish full enewsletters is disabled (rather, your email readers will received much smaller email with just a
few stories, with a link to view the rest on the website).
As I mentioned your branded banner (Appearance / Branding) is a Paid only option, as well as
the previously undiscussed custom CSS styling that you can plug in.
RSS is a 100% paid option and Ads cannot be turned off with the free version.
Finally, two important Statistical components are not available: the ability to see the email
addresses of your subscribers as well as importing your stats to Google Analytics.
Besides subscriber insights, to me the most important reason to upgrade is this tool:
The ability to control when your subscribers are informed that your next issue is out more than
justifies the $9.
Whichever way you go though, I highly recommend Paper.li. It has significantly increased our
clients with their marketing initiatives and despite our continued customization of our enewspapers, it has significantly productivity within our email marketing.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. If you would like to know more about
Paper.li, Buyer Personas, or InBound Marketing in general give us a call: 877-380-6698. You can
also reach us at [email protected]. -- Jeremiah 18
Did you enjoy this? Check out our latest ebook on Inbound vs Outbound Marketing!
INBOUND
INBOUND
INBOUND
19