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The Media Module Series:
Daily Living : Media (Basic)
Finding Your Media Voice
Images & Animation
Newspaper Promotion Strategy(This Article!)

Up Next: (Subscribe to be alerted of its release)
Guide to Article Archetypes


1. Checking your number of subscribers
The goal of reaching 1000 subscribers and receiving a Media Mogul Achievement may be highly difficult in a small country such as ours. So knowing exactly how many people you’ve managed to convince to subscribe to your paper is important for judging whether you’re appealing to the media readers of Ireland. My advise is to create your own milestones and celebrate them with as much vigour and delight as you would any ingame achievement which rewards you with pixels and gold 😉 Something I like to do is “race” other newspapers which are active for new subscriptions. Perhaps you want to overtake a well known citizens subs? Or get within the top 100 ranked Newspapers in eIreland?

Here are a few different methods for identifying the number of citizens subscribed to your newspaper:
Use an Organisation
Organisations cannot be created anymore so this may be difficult for new citizens. When you view your newspaper your number of subscriptions is located in the top right corner.

Newspaper Rankings (Quicklink)
Using this you can compare your papers subs to others in Ireland.
Community-> Rankings -> choose newspapers in left box -> choose Ireland in right box
Hint: Amend the second last number in the url to avoid having to click right 5 trillion times and instead quickly flick through to the lower rankings!

Greasemonekey Script
eRepublik Advanced (Get it here!) is a script that makes some important minor and major changes to the eRepublik layout and it’s useability. The spotlight feature for our present purposes is the ability to see your subscriptions when you view your newspaper from your citizen account. So simple you’d imagine it would have been implimented ingame by now right 😉

Requires Firefox + Greasemonkey




2. Latest / Top Articles Strategy & Understanding

The 5 spaces of the Latest Articles allow any Irish citizen to be within 2 clicks of your article. Maintaining in the latest articles for as long as possible is important for new journalists as they don’t have the subscriber base of a mature newspaper which will be alerted to new articles and vote them up.

Staying in the top 5 latest articles is largely done by educated guesswork. If it’s congress election time (23/24) then my advice is to hold off for a couple of days,unless the article is time sensitive, as you’re likely to get knocked out of the top5 latest articles quite quickly. This advice also holds true when there’s a particularly contentious Presidential or Party Presidential election ongoing. Articles remain in the extended Latest Articles section until 50 more articles push it out.

The 5 spaces for Top Articles viewable immediately once you log in are the ultimate aim of any new journalist for a couple of reasons.
It’s a nice sign that you’re article has been appreciated by the community.
But also, achieving this prime position as quickly as possible allows your article the greatest exposure possible to any Irish citizen logging in.
Gaining this exposure may mean additional subscribers which should ease the process of getting voted into the Top5 next time round.

I’m unsure of the habits of other erep players but technically being in the Top10 rated articles means you’re as close (in clicks) to having your article viewed as being in the Top5 latest so that’s a good goal to aim for.

Articles published over 48 hours ago are removed from the Top Rated Articles section. For this reason timing can be important. You may see that a number of the Top5 rated are soon to be removed and know that with a certain number of votes you could get up there.
Note : the timestamp given to an article is related to when you click “write article” in your newspaper page and not when you hit publish. Copy and paste then publish immediately to get yourself an extra half hour in the top rated section! (or however long it takes you to write an article!)

Top Tip
- Split up big articles into two for longer exposure in the media. Let readers know what’s coming next, this way you give them a reason to subscribe. Also your newspaper is “on the shelf” for an extended period so more people should pass by your newspaper.
(ahemmm.... that’s kinda why this series got so spread out.... that and the fact noone woulda read the enormous tl;dr version had I written it in one go!)




3. Shouts
Find Friends! … or at least acquaintances
Shouts are only visible to your officially added friends. My advice is to friend request anyone you see that has commented on an article in Ireland since if they read the media, they’re most likely to be interested in reading your articles. You could also check out your political party’s page, click “show all members” and then add a few friends from there. Another good place to try is the Congress results of the last election. (available from the Politics tab of Country Administration) Usually elected TDs (congressmen) will be media reading citizens and are happy to receive friend requests.

You can release 30 shouts a day (new feed system may have changed this). I’d say the ideal is to release a few shouts at different prime-times. For example I imagine real life Irish players are more likely to log on from maybe 7pm-10pm GMT and east coast Americans from about midnight GMT onwards, etc.

You can use the same code to hyperlink words as in an article but the code counts towards the 140 character limit of the shout. Unfortunately only the hyperlink bbcode works in shouts. You can use tinyurl to shorten the link to your article or remove the name of the article from the link if you need to shorten it only a little bit.
Eg. This http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/1603427/1/20 works equally as well as this http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/images-amp-animation-1603427/1/20

EDIT :(New feed system for shouts has removed the ability to use code to hyperlink. Post a url and it'll appear as a clickable link when posted)

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Unusual characters such as the example above work wonders in grabbing attention in the sea of shouts which currently flow.




4. Forum / irc
By referencing this amazing table of every countries forum, irc and ingame chatrooms you can target your advertising (rea😛 spamming!) of your article towards the citizens of countries who’d be most likely interested in it.

Political Party Communications in Ireland
Fenian Brotherhood - Forum
Sons of Eireann - IRC channel
IUP - Forum
IWP - IRC channel

The Irish Newsstand on our National Forum
My Recommended Thread Type:
Start a thread
Always update the 1st post with the latest article link and summary
Show a list of your recent articles
Whenever you release a new article bump up with a quick summary to hook peoples interest




5. Mass PMing (mass mailer - http://erep.thepenry.net/ created by AndraX2000)
Probably the finest tool ever created for politicians, Government, journalists and just about everyone who wishes to communicate on a grand scale through private messages. You can save lists of citizens if you’ll be PMing them regularly. There’s an amazing “saved search” feature which is useful for targeting citizens with specific attributes. You can be informed whether the recipient has looked in their inbox or whether they’ve clicked to view your message.

* PM citizens currently online.
This can be useful to help you get off to a running start in terms of votes for your new article. eRepublik makes it easy to see which Irish citizens are online or citizens of any country who are online now. This amazing spreadsheet (prepare to be underwhelmed!) makes things a little easier. Copy and Paste the orange column into the mass mailer and use it as your list of targets when using the mass mailer.

* Target PMs at those likely to be interested in the topic of your article.
The Mass Mailer allows you to perform saved searches. These are essentially dynamic lists which are created based on whatever class of citizen you which to target with your PMs. For example you could set the options to select Irish citizens below a certain erep age who own a company if you were doing a piece on business or the economy aimed at newish citizens.

6. Ingame advertising
Currently offline for maintenance. I’ll update this section should they return at some point in the future!
Royal Marketing claim to provide citizen advertising at a discount of up to 33% off the Admin price.




7. Buying votes & subs
Buying article votes for articles or subscriptions for your newspaper is possible here
Opinions tend to strongly differ on whether this is a harmful service or a useful one so I’ll inform you of it and let your conscience decide whether to utilise the service. Personally I feel a few votes could be useful for an aspiring newspaper to get the much needed and difficult exposure required upon startup! However it’s just not as thrilling to see your article in the top 5 having paid for it to get there imho.




8. Random Promotion Tips

Images with arrows pointing to the Vote and Subscribe buttons are popular with some journalists. (An example of this using a gif animation - here)

Comment on other articles with a link to your own article. Or you can wrap bbcode round the words of the comment to hyperlink them (the same as that used in articles.) That way you aren’t spamming and may arouse some interest from those whos curiosity is spiked by the Iink. If you’re article is only related to eIreland don’t flood the american media or somewhere like that with links tho! One other method I’ve seen is comments such as “Voted, could you return the favour?” with a link to another article attached.

Lotterys which can be entered by commenting your vote/sub number after clicking them is another common promotion tool. You may wish to provide staggered rewards. Such as, for example, holding the raffle/lottery for every 25 subscriptions you receive or increasing the pool of prizes with every 10 subs. Usually a minimum increase in subscriptions will be required for any prize to be handed out.

A variation of this raffle/reward promotion system is to request others shout your article link and post a comment saying to have done so. The comment allows you to easily check their profile to see if they have indeed carried out what they’ve claimed to! It’s useful to provide a ready-made shout for the reader to copy and paste.

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Up Next: (Subscribe to be alerted of its release)
Guide to Article Archetypes

Brought to you by: Sean Power (Now sporting the Leo look...)




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