There’s good news for even solo citizen journalists who want to improve how their sites are found through search engines like Google: Your own homegrown search engine optimization can get you many of the benefits of a professional retooling. Search engine optimization, or SEO, just means making your site as easy to find and highly ranked as possible by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. That way, people using those engines to look for relevant content can find what you have to offer. That’s increasingly important as more and more visitors find their way to sites like yours not by typing in your Web address, but by plugging a few choice words into their favorite search engine. Learn some easy ways to boost your ranking and get more traffic.

There’s been an explosion in the number of nonprofit news sites, and now you’re considering joining this exciting movement.

Here’s a word of caution: You won’t just be doing journalism. You will be an employer, a manager, a grants writer, a negotiator and sometimes a bookkeeper. You’ll have a steep learning curve. But if you decide to go ahead, you’ll be in good company: Scores of enthusiastic and dedicated people have gone before you and formed journalism nonprofits that are carrying out good work.

This module sets out to identify the hurdles you’ll face and guide you through the process of creating a nonprofit newsroom. Even if you ultimately decide that you want to create a for-profit business, you’ll find some useful tips in this module.

What this module can do for you

Interviewing: A practical guide for citizen journalists will show you:

1. How interviewing can improve your community reporting.
2. How to identify what type of interviews fit your goals.
3. How to find people to talk to.
4. How to approach them and arrange an interview.
5. How to conduct productive interviews.
6. How to edit and publish an interview.
7. How to navigate ethical conundrums that can come with interviewing.

If you’re like most journalists and media entrepreneurs, you use social media daily, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing all you could with it to engage with your community, listen and monitor the conversation, or use it to plan outreach campaigns around news events, real world meet-ups and breaking stories.

That’s where this guide comes in. It’s a roadmap for improving both your understanding of social media and your use of it. This learning module focuses on the principles of authenticity, transparency and crowd-sourced, real-time communication that make social media so strikingly different from traditional media. It will also give you hands-on tools, tips and tactics that can make your daily use of Facebook, Twitter and other resources much more effective.

How to Measure your Web Traffic and Understand Who’s Visiting your Site

Whether you’re running a small hyperlocal community Web site or a large regional citizen media site, you can use free or inexpensive tools to measure how many people are visiting your site and where they like to go most. With the right analytics tools, you can also get very specific details in addition to total traffic numbers. This knowledge will then empower you to improve your site, increase traffic and give accurate information to potential advertisers and sponsors.

Engaging readers is why your online news community exists. You can’t use the wisdom of the crowds if the crowd isn’t talking. Without fast and substantive engagement, you might as well publish a newspaper. So when you build it and they don’t come, what do you do, short of waiting?

This learning module is filled with text and videos that will guide journalists from story idea, through the reporting and distribution process. This approach treats the issues covered as campaigns, not just stand-alone stories. That means wide collaborations, embracing new technologies and taking the journalism out to classrooms and universities to engage the next generation.