4 Amazing Tools for Media and Content Publishing Businesses

Some of you know that my company, UJ Media Services, also runs the Japan news and culture site Unseen Japan. Recently, UJ’s Editor-in-Chief, Noah Oskow, and I participated in Kalani Scarrott’s Compounding Curiosity podcast. We talked a lot about the origins of UJ – but also about how we run UJ month to month as a content publishing business.

When we do podcasts and YouTube appearances for UJ, we often talk about our core subject matter – i.e., the latest news from Japan. It’s not that often that I get to talk about how we actually keep the lights on.

After doing the podcast, I realized that that’s a shame.

I love providing accurate, quality information on the topics I’m passionate about. I know a lot of other people are too. But there aren’t a lot of guides about how to build a site that feels less like a brand and more like a trusted source.

So I thought I’d take a break from our usual subject matter. Today, I want to discuss some of the tools we use at UJ that are indispensable to running the site as a content publishing business. Along the way, I’ll also share some of the tips and tricks I’ve developed for creating and marketing your content.

If you’re running or plan to run a similar business, I hope you gain a few tips and tricks from this!

Note: Links below are affiliate links – Unseen Japan earns a commission at no additional cost to you if you make a purchase.

General advice on content publishing for newbies

There are two reasons someone may start a content publishing business:

You’re selling a product or service and want to draw more customers in with compelling, useful content
You’re interested in a specific niche topic and have a passion for talking about it,

Both are equally valid goals. (UJ’s parent company, UJ Media Services, helps companies with the former.) No matter what your goal is, however, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First, creating a content publishing business takes years, not months. The Internet is awash in terabytes of new content daily. WordPress users alone generate 70 million new posts every month.

It takes effort to stand out from the crowd. You’re not going to be an overnight success. If you’re committing to content publishing, make sure you’re in it for the long haul.

Second, and related, you need to love what you’re talking about. You’re not going to last if you’re measuring “success” purely in terms of dollars and cents.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m thrilled whenever Unseen Japan hits a new financial milestone. But for us, the greatest reward comes when someone says they learned something new about Japan from one of our articles or videos. It gives us the motivation to keep going even when financial growth in a given month might be slow.

And third, be careful where you invest your time and energy. There are tons of ways to grow your content business – writing articles, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Patreon, Facebook, etc. You can’t do all of them well – especially if you’re starting off as a solo creator. You’ll burn out in a matter of months.

Define your two or three most important platforms and focus on doing them well. As your brand grows financially and you can afford to pay people fairly to help, consider branching out.

Build trust above all else

As I said, there are various economic models for a content publishing business. At UJ, we have multiple. Our consulting business helps pay for some of what we do on the Web site. And we use Patreon subscriptions and affiliate sales to help pay our monthly fees as well as pay our writers for their amazing contributions.

This multi-revenue stream model is pretty much unavoidable. Gone are the days when a site could slap a bunch of Google ads on itself and call it a day. (And good riddance – generic ads are terrible and distract readers from your content.)

No matter what revenue models you adopt, however, you shouldn’t lead with selling. If you’re making a sale to readers the first time they come to your site, you’re doing it wrong.

When I started building our Patreon, I looked around for advice on how to market it. I found this great post chock full of advice from Suzanna Yada. The one piece of advice that stuck with me was to think of visiting your site and subscribing to it as the difference between a first date and marriage. As Suzanne puts it, you shouldn’t ask for marriage on the first date.

A lot of what we do on UJ – from writing in-depth articles to providing daily updates on our Twitter account – is built on this philosophy. We don’t hit our readers up for money right when they first land on the site. And advertising our Patreon and our affiliates is only around 5-10% of our total activity. The rest of the time, we’re focused on our creating great content. It’s an approach I recommend to all of our clients as well.

Our recommendations

With that out of the way, here are some of the top tools I recommend to get you started. The tools below are focused primarily on content publishing – i.e., writing articles. But many of these tools and strategies are useful for those of you focused on art, video production, or other forms of content as well.

Number 1: WordPress Hosting and Site Building

Recommendation: WordPress with Elementor

When I started Unseen Japan, I initially used a static blog engine. This is a tool that allows you to write in a language called Markdown and then publish your site as static files to an online host, like Amazon Web Services.

The plus side of this? It was dirt cheap. But once we brought on multiple authors, it became hard to manage. Plus, the site’s visual design was just a grade above MySpace.

We solved both problems by moving to WordPress with Elementor.

WordPress hardly needs an introduction. It’s best one of the best Content Management Platforms on the market for years. And with a huge ecosystem of plugins, the possibilities for extending your site are unlimited.

But it can be hard to design a decent-looking Web site in WordPress. Especially if, like me, your design skills are barely above zero. And the standard solution for hosting WordPress sites, WordPress.com, comes with numerous restrictions on plugins and commercial activity.

That’s where Elementor comes in. Elementor provides a drag-and-drop visual design experience and a large package of sleek, modern-looking Web site templates. Even if you’re a novice, you can create an appealing Web site in Elementor. And you can easily build out landing pages for initiatives like newsletter sign-ups, e-book sales, and online seminars.

Elementor also comes with a built-in suite of WordPress features that you’d normally have to purchase separately. For example, many WordPress Web sites use a package like WPForms to enable email forms and newsletter signups. But Elementor comes with its own forms package included! We use it on UJ for newsletter signups and it works like a champ.

Elementor used to be available just as a plug-in to WordPress. However, they’ve recently launched Elementor Cloud, which gives you a fully hosted WordPress solution for just $99 for the entire year. The price includes a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help speed up the delivery of your content around the world. That’s the cheapest price you’re likely to find for reliable WordPress hosting anywhere.

Limitations with Elementor Cloud hosting (and workarounds)

Elementor Cloud is a great starter package if you’re just getting your site off the ground. However, it does have some limitations.

Elementor Cloud works best with sites that do up to 100,000 visitors a month and expect to have around 30GB of data transfer. Elementor says they’re flexible with these numbers and your site will keep running if you exceed them. However, the service has what appears to be a hard limit of 20GB of data storage.

At UJ, we’ve been using Elementor as a WordPress plug-in for our site hosted on Kinsta. We’ve been impressed with Kinsta’s reliability and scalability. While we definitely pay more for the privilege of using it, it’s worth having a hassle-free hosting experience. We’ve never had an issue with the performance of our site even during large traffic bursts.

My recommendation? Start with Elementor Cloud hosting for your first year or so. As your site grows, investigate moving to a service like Kinsta. If you expect a large amount of traffic out of the gate, go straight to Kinsta hosting and license Elementor as a WordPress plug-in.

Number 2: Finding the right search engine keywords

Recommendation: KWFinder and the Mangools Suite

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of writing content so that it ranks highly in search engines (mainly Google). And no term is hotter in the SEO world than long-tail keywords.

Most high-volume search terms are dominated by large companies with solid Google juice. The idea behind long-tail keywords is to write content against a larger set of lower-volume search terms. Over time, grabbing a few clicks from a large body of search terms can result in sizable organic search traffic to your Web site.

So how do you find long-tail keywords? Our own favorite tool for this is the Mangools suite. Mangools supports a number of useful tools, our favorite of which is KWFinder.

Using KWFinder, you can look up a search term you might want to write content against. KWFinder will tell you, not only how much search traffic that term does, but the likelihood that your site can rank for it. It’ll also give you a list of related keywords that you might find easier to rank for.

For example, if I search for “japan”, KWFinder will tell me in no uncertain terms I’d be foolish to even try ranking for that.

However, you’ll also get a list of terms off to the left that might be more within your grasp. The more detailed search terms you put in, the better the recommendations you’ll get.

Mangools also offers a ton of other useful tools with your subscription. For example, Backlink Miner will tell you who’s linking to your competitor’s articles. This can be useful in link building – a.k.a., building high-quality backlinks from other sites to your own.

Don’t just write for search engines

I do want to give one caveat here as a publisher. I think it’s very easy to over-index on writing for search engine keywords as a news and media Web site. If I look at our search engine statistics, I see maybe half of our traffic was “planned” by targeting specific keywords. The other half is from articles we wrote simply because they were topical and we thought our audience would like them.

Additionally, just because you target a search term doesn’t mean you’ll rank for it. We’ve had about a 60% success rate in targeting terms we thought were “gettable”.

In general, I’d suggest using a tool like KWFinder for two purposes:

Target a few select keywords with useful, evergreen content; and
Find the best keywords to increase visibility for topics you planned to write about anyway

In other words, don’t let writing to the search engines become your site’s whole-ass personality.

Recommended: Mailchimp

A lot of people groan when I bring up building an email newsletter. Email? What is this, 2004?!

That used to be my reaction, too. But there are very, very good reasons why your news and media Web site must have an email newsletter.

I can’t deny that social media is a solid way to drive site traffic. Unseen Japan has a Twitter following of over 50,000 and we post micro-content there daily. It’s been very good for us.

But social media traffic is also flaky and inconsistent. We can go from 1,000+ visitors directed in a day from Twitter down to 200 the next day. It all depends on whether the promotion algorithm is smiling upon us that day.

That’s not even the worse thing about social media, though. The worse thing is that we don’t own our social media accounts. One of our social media companies could ban us tomorrow and we’d have zero recourse to appeal that decision.

That’s where an email list comes in. Email is everything that social media is not:

It’s ours. We own our email list – and will continue to own it, even if we get tossed off of our current mailing list provider.
It’s predictable. The open rates and click-through rates are well-known for each industry and tend not to vary wildly week after week.
It’s direct. We can communicate with our readers and ensure a majority of them will read what we write. We don’t have to depend on an algorithm to make our posts visible to our audience.
It’s profitable. An email list is also a great way to drive revenue for your site. We use ours principally to drive subscriptions to our premium content and make affiliate sales.
It’s targetable. You can craft email campaigns based on audience behavior, such as location or how many times recipients have opened your previous messages. This increases engagement and helps drive subscriptions and sales.

Mailchimp is the 400lbs. gorilla in the email list management space and has worked well for us. While Mailchimp has a lot of features you can unlock for a price, the free plan should work to get you started if you’re on a budget. You can then upgrade as you build your audience and grow your revenue.

For the most part, if you’re running a news & media Web site, I recommend keeping direct ads to a minimum. We send our newsletter weekly and only do two revenue-related messages once or twice a month. Put the emphasis primarily on providing value to your readers!

Number: Group productivity management

Recommended: Notion

If you’re a one-person shop, then you can likely manage everything you need in WordPress. But if you’re working with a team (as most news & media Web sites are), you’ll want a way to manage who’s working on what. It also helps to have a place where your team can dump all of its ideas for upcoming stories, along with links, interview notes, and other related information.

With anywhere from five to eight writers contributing at a time, managing everything in Slack and WordPress was just too daunting. After using Notion with a few of our private clients, I decided to adopt it for Unseen Japan. And I’m happy I did!

While originally developed for software development teams, Notion works great as a general productivity solution for any application. Its task management application makes adding new tasks and managing workflow easy. You can modify tasks to contain any custom attribute or status you need to manage content production.

Notion also contains other features, such as a Wiki and meeting notes. We use Notion internally to maintain guides for our writers on authoring, link-building, and other activities critical to our business.

One caveat: Notion’s pricing can be a bit steep if you’re on a budget. However, the company also offers a USD $500 credit to startups. If you qualify (we did!), this is enough to cover the cost of 4-7 people entirely for a year.

Conclusion: Succeeding with content publishing

Bootstrapping a content publishing business doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of hard work and dedication. But investing in the right tools early on can hasten your success.

And if all this sounds like too much of a hassle, you can always hire sometime to do it for you. Unseen Japan’s parent company UJ Media Services specializes in managing content creation, promotion, and hosting for all types of businesses.