How can we grow this venture without spending an additional penny?
Meaning ours or yours?
It's simple: Join a couple little clubs we're creating on social media, and help us share certain select premium content to expose our brand to more eyeballs and, ideally, more subscribers if they give us a chance.
• On Twitter, follow the account @DKPSLunatics ... and I'll approve you to enter.
• On Facebook, join the group DKPS Lunatics ... and I'll approve you there, as well.
We've had readers ask us here for years if they can share a given article to friends or family. This allows for that, as the only content we'll put there will either be free or released from its premium shackles. So you can feel comfortable knowing you're not sending someone a payment screen.
On Twitter, your retweets and/or likes will allow us to place our content higher in people's timelines. On Facebook, your shares, likes and comments are ... wow, just huge. Facebook's made life hell on businesses like ours, and the only way to break through is to show their overlords that you're getting legit engagement and, in turn, that you're not some Russian bot.
For those of you who aren't on either, we're working on a similar plan involving email, but that one's not ready yet. I'll let you know when it is.
For Twitter and Facebook, they're ready right now! Both!
Thanks in advance for everything you do to help!
THOSE TALKING POINTS
With no announcement or explanation, we began a feature these past two weeks called Talking Points, and I'm happy to say they've been received well.
They're mini-columns, if you will, whipped up by our staff. Only about 300 words. And each ends with a pointed question for the readership to basically complete the process. In one that I wrote this week, for example, I openly acknowledged being unable to take my stance any further, and the readers took it from there with 120-plus comments.
For all the video/audio work we do, I've insisted throughout that this company's about the written word. It's nice to see it supported.
WEEKLY APP TIPS
Sharing ways to make your app experience even better:
• Get an avatar!
Only 774 of our readers currently have an avatar for their comments, and that makes for a whole lot of blah, gray nothingness. Let's change that this week. Open up your profile -- top left of the app or site -- and you'll see a circle at the top, along with a little camera. Either take or enter your image right there.
(Warning: There's currently a defect in the app where it can't handle pics of significant size, so you'll probably have to do this on the laptop until it's fixed.)
Our previous two tips:
• We can add images into comments now! Just find an existing photo or GIF anywhere on the Internet, including this site, copy the image's URL -- that's the web address assigned to that photo -- and paste it into your comment. We can't yet add videos, the way we could on the old site, but we'll get there.
• Check out the TODAY button on the app. It's out front on the horizontal blue stripe. Once you tap it, you'll see a schedule unfurl. That's updated every day, complete with links, and it lays out our coverage plan, as well as details of our covered teams' plans for the day. And under that, you'll find the just-mentioned What's Brewing feature that poses a weekly survey for our community, welcomes new users and, of course, includes our staff map.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 538,685, up 9.8% from the previous week. Our most-read original piece was my column on the Penguins at the NHL trade deadline, at 9,129. Broken down by team, articles on the Penguins brought 30.3% of our traffic, the Pirates 16.7%, the Steelers 16.1%.
• Our new subscribers for the past week were at 89, up 35 from the previous week.
• Our new app downloads for the past week were 111 for Apple, up 48 from the previous week, and 76 for Android, down 53 from the previous week.
• Our podcast downloads for the past week were 83,733, up less than 1% from the previous week but still yet another single-week record. That also included a record day of 17,173 on Thursday, our first time over 17K.
• We're at 40,253 (+167) followers on Twitter, we're at 37,049 (-66) followers on Facebook, we're at 14,455 (+9) followers on Instagram, and we're at 1,171 (+20) followers on YouTube. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Random geographic fun: We had 13,386 unique users in Canada in the past week, which comprised an astounding 12.9% of our total traffic. If we've ever had a figure that high from a foreign country, I'm unaware of it. But if I had to guess at why it happened, I've had sources inform me that they like hockey up there.