Everyone who’s had to sit next to a business-school student at Thanksgiving knows about the funnel. There are lots of versions of it, but the core idea in publishing terms is this:
At the top of the funnel you’ve got a lot of people who have a very loose connection to your news site. Say they’ve never heard of you, but they clicked a link in their Twitter feed and now they’re reading one of your articles.
Your job is to move as many of those people as you can down the funnel — meaning into greater and greater connection and commitment to what you do. Say you get that reader to click on a different story once they’re done with the first one. Or you get them to do back to your homepage and look around. You get them to sign up for your email newsletter, which they start reading every day. In that newsletter one day, you mention your podcast and you get them to listen and subscribe. Eventually, you generate enough value for that reader that they start coming back —…
