Digital content producer Sam Lynas graduated from University College Falmouth in 2009. On Monday the 20th of February 2012 he returned to give a lecture on how journalism students can go about creating an online audience. After graduating, Lynas worked locally in Bodmin with Barefoot Media, a PR and digital marketing company. At the same time he was maintaining his own specialist blog ‘The Cornish Pasty Man’. No prizes for guessing what he wrote about.
He encouraged the students to really write about something original as he had done, commenting that: “If you don’t, someone else will. It’s ultra, ultra competitive at the moment, even more so every year.” He explained how writing online is a lot easier and therefore a lot more challenging than writing for a newspaper or magazine, where you must be BJTC accredited and have qualifications. He continued: “If you want to write online, at the moment there aren’t the same guidelines or boundaries in place [as opposed to print media]. So that means that anyone can do it, so all the competition there is in the journalism marketplace or realm is kind of multiplied tenfold.”
He made it clear that in the online world, content is king. Create an original, interesting and consistent blog and you will find yourself much more appealing to an audience. After playing a game of ‘Play Your Keywords Right’, Lynas demonstrated that using keywords that come up frequently in Google searches can promote your blog to a wider audience. At the same time he explained how researching your audience is one of the most important things you can do, as gaining an understanding of their age, location and technical ability etc. can actually affect the different ways you interact with your audience. For example, using more photographs or having a video-based blog for people who want to read about fashion is a better way of gratifying your audience than simply writing paragraphs of text with no visual aids.
Lynas’s lecture allowed us journalism students to feel slightly more ambitious about our future, and certainly gave us an idea or two on how to promote our blogs to the wider and hopefully more receptive world.
Lynas can be found on Twitter HERE
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