News jacking means taking news stories and sharing them with your readers while also injecting your own opinions. It’s not really a new technique. People have been sharing news stories for years both online and off. But what’s different about news jacking is that today’s technology allows you to discover what’s trending and share it in real-time, which makes it more effective than ever.
Finding Stories
How do you know which stories are the best to share with your readers? One way is to subscribe to several newsletters that relate to your niche. Whenever you see a story that you think your readers would like, share it immediately.
You can also sign up for alerts. Choose relevant keywords and set up alerts so that whenever a new news story is posted that contains those keywords, you’ll know immediately.
Social media offers some good ways to search as well. There are software programs that help you find trending stories on Twitter, which you can then share with you audience.
Sharing News Stories
There are several ways to share news stories. You can put them on your blog or share them with social media. Social media is a good method because you can write a simple blurb about the story and include a link.
If you blog on a story, be sure that you don’t just copy the story and paste it. That’s stealing content. But it’s also not really news jacking because you’re missing the most important element – your own ideas.
By the way, you’ll notice that I keep using terms like ‘immediately.’ The reason is that the real-time action of news jacking is what makes it so effective. You want to be the first place they hear about the story. If you successfully do that, you keep them tuned in.
Injecting Your Own Ideas
The most important element is to put your own ideas into the stories you share. Summarize the story or tell your audience how it relates to them. You can ask a question to get them commenting and interacting.
In fact, you can take a story that’s not 100% relevant to your niche and share it. What’s important is that you can relate it to your audience somehow. If you’re in the IM niche, for example, you can share a story about mountain climbers reaching Mt. Everest. Share the inspiring words they said about the climb and tell your readers that climbing Everest is a bit like cracking a six-figure income for the first time.
How do you know exactly what your audience likes? Well, at first you don’t. You have a pretty good idea to start with, but you just have to throw stuff out there and see what sticks. Watch your stats and the level of engagement among your readers. When you get a hit, find more stories like it.
Tony Phelps
