“I can’t see how it’s possible to make the pure advertising model work unless you have enormous scale. Publishers have to find other ways of making money.”

It’s interesting to note that Grimshaw doesn’t seem to have considered a) working towards an enormous scale or b) innovating a new platform; it’s the lack of creativity I find the most frustrating. If the MD hasn’t got the answers he doesn’t deserve to be in his lofty position, it’s time to start firing the old firm and promoting the juniors.

“You’ve got to pay for it” seems to be the only answer big media hitters can come up with, and so far, in the history of all things internet, no one has ever paid for anything. The problem I see with their pricing model is the clear generation gap. They might get some people over the age of 40 to pay for their content – but aren’t these the same people who still buy their newspapers? How do they plan on attracting a younger audience who grew up reading blogs, reddit, and digg?

The quick fix solution of slapping a price tag on their content is like throwing paper on a dying fire, the party will continue for a brief comforting period followed by its swift and inevitable collapse into grey dust. They’ve really got to get creative to keep the party going – install some disco lights, hire a DJ, hand out some goodies and amass a large following and once you’ve got them there, sell things to them.

OK, so it’s not the best analogy, but I’m sure you see my point.

The music industry has been as slow to react to the changing times as the printed media industry has. They expend all of their energy clinging desperately to whatever influence they have left to point at pirates and content thieves and cry unfair, all the while startups like hypem, last fm and spotify take it upon themselves to sort things out. To take an Eddie Izzard analogy, the mainstream media have been demoted from the driving seat to cleaning  the windscreen at the traffic lights dreaming of how it could have been.

The innovation and experimentation has got to start today. Start thinking “how are we going to do this without a paid model?” My answer would be to let your brands become conglomerates of smaller ones – give your staff the room, support and funding to innovate online platforms. If you’re convinced that money from consumers needs to end up in your pocket, know this – people certainly won’t pay for written content. They’re going to want much more than that if they’re ever to part with their hard earned cash, and what do you currently have to offer them? Very little.

Videos are free on YouTube, music is free on spotify, and television is free on hulu, iPlayer and 4OD so why are people going to pay to read your words? They’re not.

Companies that have innovated are the companies that excite young people so it’s innovation you need to be taking part in. Why isn’t big media doing everything they can to fund UK media start ups? I’d be hesitant to say it’s because they don’t want to be dethroned by a company with an average age below that of their children. Spot.us is an idea that should have been developed by big media, as was tumblr, twitter, vimeo, viddler, kaltura, and wikipedia, but alas, big media has been too busy counting its dwindling chips.

They’ve been immersed for so long in the status quo they’ve forgotten what innovation means, how to do it, and why it’s important. If I were aboard the sinking ship I’d forget the wishful thinking that el’capitanos is going save me. Start frantically designing life rafts to float away and prosper.

The flash mob Beyonce video has been up only two days and has already pulled in 200,000 hits, a sure fired success whichever way you look at it. The attention it has recieved is testament to the idea that you ran ride the popularity wave of a viral months after it’s originally surfaces and still grab decent attention. Of course they’ve referenced at least three meme’s or virals here, the Indonesian prison Thriller dance, the flashmob, and of course Beyonce’s original video. The problem with this type of viral is that the sponsors are sometimes overlooked, lower attention spans mean people might move on before the brand responsible gets aired. The strings for this video were pulled by Trident, who are running a competition for tickets to see Beyonce, so do them a favour and click their link so we might get more Beyonce type videos in the future. Thanks Trident, we owe you one, this is social media 101.

Here we are going to look at 5 top recommended plugins to help you optimise and attract traffic to your blog. In most cases plugins take just a few seconds to install. Simply click on the link we’ve provided, and download the file from the following page. If you’re using Wordpress 2.7 just click “plugins” on your dashboard and upload the whole zip file you just downloaded using the hander installer. If using Wordpress 2.6 or older, simply unzip the file and upload the contents via FTP to the wp-content/plugins directory of your full Wordpress installation. Then log into wordpress, click on “plugins” and activate.

1. All In One SEO Pack

This Plugin is surely the daddy of all SEO plugins available for Wordpress right now. As the name suggests, All in One SEO Pack provides all the basic functions you need to optimise important aspects of your wordpress blog. With it you can;

- Manually designate the title, description and keywords on your homepage, and an optimised format for all other post and page titles. For example, your initial wordpress install will place the name of your blog first in the title tag of each new blog post, page or category, which is not ideal for SEO. All in One SEO pack allows you to construct a format that works best for your blog (typically the post title first, followed by your blog title).

- Enter META keywords and descriptions for each new post or page, or generate them automatically.

- Avoid the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs by blocking access to category and archive pages.

2. Google Analytics for Wordpress

Google Analytics has continued to increase in popularity, due in no small part to the fact that it is free, but also thanks to its ever expanding toolset allowing for more in-depth analysis. If you’re currently only running the standard Wordpress Blog Stats plugin, or you are running no tracking system at all, you really should consider signing up and installing Google Analytics to find out more about the traffic that is visiting your site. Installation requires some code to be entered into your blog’s template, however, which can be daunting for anyone unfamiliar with the many languages of the web (editing a single wordpress template typically requires a basic understanding of HTML, PHP and CSS). Google Analytics for Wordpress provides a quick and easy way to automatically add the code you are provided with on signup to Google Analytics, so you can start tracking your traffic right away.

3. Google (XML) Sitemaps

This plugins automatically generates and updates an XML sitemap file on your site. This file is simply a list of all posts and pages, allowing search engines to quickly find and index them all. What’s more, when you submit the address of your sitemap (typically www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) to Google Webmaster tools (sign up using the same information used to access Google Analytics), your blog will automatically inform Google immediately whenever a new post or page is published, helping your new post to be indexed in a matter of hours, rather than days.

4. Redirection

From time to time, you might will want to change the URLs of your pages or posts. There are a number of reasons you might want to do this; you may wish to change the name of a post or page, and so change the URL to match, for example. Use Redirection to make sure users and search engine spiders are seamlessly redirected from any old URLs to their newer counterparts, or risk losing traffic thanks to old, dead URLs that lead only to your error page.

5. Sociable

If you’ve spent any time reading about SEO in general, you’ll have heard the mantra “the best thing you can do to optimise your site is write good, compelling content, as other internet users might link to it from their own blogs and websites”. While this strategy is indeed effective, it brings with it two problems; actually coming up with good, compelling content, and then getting people to read it. Unfortunately there’s no Wordpress plugins to write great content for you (yet!), but you can put the content you write in front of potentially thousands of eyeballs using Sociable.

The Sociable plugin makes it easy for you to add bookmarking buttons for your favourite social networks such as digg, stumbleupon and reddit to each post and page on your blog, reminding your readers to spread the love a little if they liked what they read. Whenever someone uses a social network to bookmark a page on your site, they will send other users with similar interests from that same network. Thankfully these networks tend to be used in part by precisely the kind of people you want to target – bloggers and other website owners who might link to your site as a citation, recommendation, or simply to provoke discussion on their own blog.

So go ahead, install these plugins and watch your traffic jump. Need help coming up with content that grabs your visitor’s attention? Drop Fluid Creativity a line at info@fluidcreativity.co.uk and let us help you with some ideas.