How Do I Promote My Program?

You want a robust and successful journalism program.

Here are a few ideas to help your program develop an outstanding reputation in your school and community.

1) Invite school board members to submit articles.

2) Provide award certificates to participating students at the end of the year.

2a) Award special recognition at end of year awards ceremony to a handful of your outstanding staff members.

3) Send a press release to local newspapers announcing your online school newspaper program.

3a) You may want to include in your press release details of how going online is innovative, saves the school and taxpayers money, is "going green" by saving on paper.

4) Get local businesses and organizations with websites to link to your online school newspaper.

4a) At a minimum, you will want your online school newspaper site linked to by your official school and / or district site.

5) Be sure to include meaningful keywords with your articles. There is a keyword field on the Article Manager page.

If you want a broader reach for your online student newspaper, consider submitting your online school newspaper site to the DMOZ Open Directory Project. Most of the major search engines pull site listings from this directory.

Submit your online student news site to DMOZ.

DMOZ is a human edited (volunteer) directory. It may take a long time to be listed and you may never be listed at all. But, it is worth a few minutes of your time to try.

Be careful not to submit a link to what are known as "link farms." These are websites that have links to just about anything! They are not well liked by the search engines and may even make your online student newspaper harder rather than easier for readers to find.