5 Ways Paper.li Can Save You Time and Money

We created our Pro package with small business owners and marketers in mind; people like us, and people like you, who work in small teams with limited resources and who need to cover a lot of “marketing” ground daily.

Our free service is a fantastic tool for monitoring industry trends or keeping up on favorite topics. However, if you’ve ever thought “Hey, this could be a nifty tool for building awareness and promoting my company or event” — you really need to go Pro.

Why? Because we have some great features that can help you save time, money and get you the biggest bang for your curated content.

Here are my favorite five ways Paper.li can help you save time and money:

1. Low cost, low effort content hub

Managing a website or blog is definitely the right move for marketing your business, but getting started can be daunting. It takes time and resources to create and maintain content.

Whether you are strapped for time, resource and maybe even budget, or if you simply want a low touch solution for creating a web presence, consider giving Paper.li Pro a try.

Services like Canva and PicMonkey make it extremely easy to create beautiful background images, banners and custom CTAs for your paper ( see point 2!). In very little time you can have a stunning branded content hub up and running that represents your brand and promotes your interests

We even offer the possibility to put your paper on a custom domain name. If you go this direction, you’ll have a lot more freedom with branding. We offer access to your paper’s CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which simply means you can modify the look and feel of your paper. Quite a bit!

 2. Custom ads to promote your business

If you’re using your paper as way to connect with community and grow your business, think about converting your ad units into Calls to Action.

Every paper comes with four standard ad units. On our basic service you’ll see AdSense running, but when you upgrade to Paper.li Pro you control these spaces. You can switch off the ads and leave your paper “advertising free” or you can use the ad spaces to upload your own Calls to Action.

Create a custom ad to promote an event, advertise a partner site or offer a free download. When you add a hyperlink with a track-able url your turn your add into a measurable Call to Action that you can track through Google Analytics.

Just want to have fun? You can simply embed a video, a holiday greeting, a music player or the meme of the week.

Papers are fun to share but you will get even more out of your time invested by converting ad units into something more compelling.

3. No hassle email newsletter service

Thirty-plus years later and email is still a marketer’s most trusted tactic. But it is also one of the most difficult to keep up. It takes time to source content and for an email newsletter to be effective it needs to roll out in a consistent manner — same time each week. It sounds easy enough, but we all know that the devil is in the doing.

Tell help marketers save time and hit consistency we created an Email Newsletter Service that sends your paper’s content to subscribers. We created three easy to use templates with the mission of making it as simple as possible for you to re-use the content that you have already curated once.

  • Single article alert: This alert carries the featured headline article from your latest edition. Great if you want to drive readers to your Paper.li daily.
  • Headlines only newsletter: This newsletter sends the default five headlines from your paper. You can replace our suggestions with your own. Nice for giving a daily content-teaser!
  • Full front page: Send this newsletter to your most loyal subscribers. It carries your full front page of content.

Finish it off with a branded touch by adding a beautiful banner. Customize the from sender and subject line to make it more personal and include a personalized message in the body of your email before it goes out.

If you use a third party email service you can even export our HTML to send to an existing list hosted somewhere else.

4. Drive additional traffic to your site

If you have an existing website but don’t have time to create new content daily or weekly, consider bringing your paper’s news to your site or blog.

Our embeds refresh automatically each time a new edition of your paper is published. And guess what? If you are using our promotional service to help attract the right audience to you and your business, you can re-direct all visitors that click on a Tweet, Post or Email directly to your website to read the news there!

You can learn more about the power of embeds and how they can drive traffic to your website here.

5. News and event round-ups for events

It has happened to us all before. You invest of ton of your time and energy in organizing an event, but when “event day” arrives you realize you don’t have the one tool you needed: a tool to gather all of the articles, images and video created during and around your event and then a way to easily share them. Create an event Paper.li next time!

One of my favorite examples of event papers is the Landscape News, a paper created for the annual Global Landscapes Forum.

Here’s how an event Paper.li can save you time:

Six weeks before the event: Create a paper, place it on a custom domain and brand it to reflect your conference’s look and feel. Add a CTA to “Register Here” in your ad units, set up a Headlines newsletter and begin promoting. Customize your promotional Tweets and posts to use your event’s #tag and promote! You’ll be surprised at how quickly your subscriber list grows.  If you don’t have a lot of time leading up to the conference set it as weekly.

One week before: As the event nears, set your paper to daily to capture all the buzz around your event.

During the event:  Keep your paper updating daily, or even Twice daily if you’re going to promote it heavily. Use the bookmarklet to add in any special posts or videos you want to highlight during the event. Participants will love receiving event news directly to their inbox as well as having a content hub they can go to and promote.

After the event: Switch your paper back to weekly and continue to offer the email newsletter service to your subscribers. It’s a great way to stay top of mind in between events.

There are a lot more ways Paper.li can save you time, money and effort.

Kelly Hungerford
Kelly's a Digital Operations Specialist and Social Brand Strategist. She helps Startups and SMBs build lean marketing operations leveraging Social Media to support business goals and connect with the people who matter most. As former Head of Community and Communications for Paper.li, she was responsible for building community-centric operations to support Paper.li's rapidly growing user-base and founding #BizHeroes, Paper.li's Brand Twitter Chat that takes place Tuesdays at 2pm ET.

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