If you’re a small newspaper on a market with low internet penetration, chances are you don’t have a website or just put shovelware online.

Ziarul de Garda, in Chisinau, Moldova, is one of these. I met today with Alina Radu, executive director. When I finished with my questions, she asked “What would be your advice for our website?”

Alina’s in a difficult position. She runs an investigative newspaper on a market where journalism blends with PR and propaganda. In other words, advertising brings in no money. Neither do bribes. On the other hand, Ziarul de Garda’s readership extends beyond the capital’s nouveaux riches, so that not every reader has an internet connection.

Going online-only would save costs, and Alina’s certainly thinking about it, but it would imply losing sales revenues and, above all, influence and penetration. For now, despite Alexandru Bostan’s great job at hacking a Wordpress theme, the online operation remains an embryonic experience, with no clear strategy.

Here are my 2 kopecks to smoothly get the web right using as little resources as possible, so as to be ready when the online market starts to grow.

1.     Check your analytics – 5 minutes/day.

Alina is proud to have “visitors from more than 60 countries”. Great. But that doesn’t mean that Ziarul de Garda is read in 60 countries and has an international influence. A one-off visitor from Google can hardly be considered a reader.

Getting familiar with notions such as bounce rate, returning visitors, RSS readers etc., helps getting an idea of who your readers are. Google’s Conversion University is a good place to start.

Drilling on the data, you’ll learn which topics have most success. That’s not counting hits, but knowing which articles lead readers to spend more time on the site – and come back.

A 5-minute check each morning shouldn’t be too heavy a burden.

2.     Improve SEO – 20 minutes/day.

Now that you know how traffic flows to and from your website, you should attract more of it. Not any visitors, mind you – only potential readers.

Search-engine-friendly titles and tags are a first step. You need to identify which keywords bring interesting traffic. Nude Russian Girl Dies on Ride will bring you tons of visitors. But a 14-year-old male from Midwestern suburbia isn’t what you’re after. Veaceslav Iordan Reacts to Chisinau Carousel Corpse will work better.

Look at Google Insight to learn who’s searching for what. If you have a couple of spare bucks, you can also try to buy keywords in regions where the interest for the topics you cover is high but where your website doesn’t rank in the top 3 results.

(That’s where the diaspora lives, for instance. If they use the local version of Google, your small, foreign website will be buried under the national media. In the case of Ziarul de Garda, why not buy the keyword Voronin in Oregon and Florida?).

3.     Improve article structure – 40 minutes/day.

Online, you need to forget all you know about physical content organization. The digital world is liquid when the physical, print universe is rock-hard.

To understand how online differs from print, this video from Digital Ethography is simply the best.

Upon watching, you’ll probably want to forget about categories and sections. You’ll want to be more flexible.

Link out. Implement RSS widgets on related keywords. Link out. Embed videos you pick on Youtube. Link out. Embed surveys. The possibilities are endless, it takes very little time to implement an idea and you don’t have to pay for the increase in bandwidth as everything is widgetized.

4.     Get involved in the conversation – 1 hour/day.

Online, the value lies in the conversation. You must, as a journalist as well as collectively, as a brand, get involved in the local conversation.

It happens in blogs, on your localized version of Wikipedia, in forums… Not only do you have to make sense of all that happens online, so as to provide your readers with the most interesting bits of content that sprout up in remote branches of the network.

You also have to take part in the conversation. That’s not as hard as it seems. Newspaper bashing is a favorite activity for bloggers. A defensive approach would entail:

• Answer comments under your own articles.
• Correct any errors spotted by your readers (and congratulate them on helping you out!)
• Set up an alert on the name of your newspaper, so as to be able to comment quickly when a blogger quotes from it.

Offensive works too:

• Read blogs, especially your readers’. By commenting on them, you’re showing your expertise.
• Link out to the blogs you read. They’ll link back, thus improving your PageRank.
• Set up (and promote) a Facebook/Vkontakte group to show support for your brand.
• Reestablish your place as a community leader by sourcing Wikipedia articles to your website.

5.     Start a blog – 2 hours/day.

A blog is a node that organizes conversation. Ideally, you want your newspaper brand to be the conversation leader on your market. Leading a modest conversation in your own, personal backyard blog will pave the way for this.

Paul Bradshaw listed what he learned from blogging. The list is impressive and shows how important it is to blog if you want to succeed online.

The topic of your blog matters little. It only has to be a very well-defined niche. Blogging about what it’s like to be a journalist in your area is an idea.

The personal tone and editorial freedom of a blog brings you closer to your readers. You slowly forget the dryness of mass media writing as you develop your own brand of online content.

Master the intricacies of blogging and you’ll understand how the economy of links works. From there, you’ll be able to use it for your website.

6.     Invite users in – 4 hours/day.

An online news operation should look like a social network for news addicts, on which normal people can come when they want to – the whole thing being run by journalists.

To get a taste of what this will be when your market matures, you should invite users in the editorial process. The goal is to share editorial power with them.

In concrete terms, it can be:

• Citizen journalism. Invite readers to publish articles. Most importantly, tell them when it’s bad, so they can improve and become auxiliary members of your newsroom. In business terms, that’s called free correspondents, once the training you gave them is amortized.
• Expert articles. Ask experts you know from your address book to write articles about their specialty. They gain visibility and you gain content and an experience in sharing editorial power.
• Blog network. Build a blog platform (Wordpress µ is free) and share your brand with bloggers. Follow the example of Respekt.cz and you’ll have a community of quality bloggers enhancing your website.

7.     Hire a community manager – Full-time position.

That’s the point where you have a real online strategy and someone to run it

What have I forgotten?

Now, this list isn’t authoritative as I have, personally, never been an editor in a newsroom in a country with low internet penetration. But for those who want to improve their online presence without spending €1000+ on a major website overhaul, it seems to me like a tangible road map.