Digital publishing is a fact of life these days. Inevitably, to compete, you must step into the digital world and keep moving. But, recent statistics serve as a good reminder that diversifying your revenue stream is a key strategy in making that transition—if you don’t, well, you could find yourself up that creek, without a paddle.

Rob O'Regan recently spoke to a glaring reminder: “digital revenues are not growing fast enough to compensate for print advertising losses. In fact, the gap is getting wider.” He then goes onto cite the unfavorable changing ratio of print advertising losses to digital advertising gains. That is why publishers are looking to “broader revenue models.”

We’ve talked about the value of diversifying your revenue model in many ways—but the current data demonstrates, even more significantly, how important it is. Sometimes, it’s good to step back and evaluate what we already know. Here’s a high-level checklist to keep you on track:

• Increase Efficiency, Save Money. Employ a SaaS CMS to streamline your work processes—with more mobility, flexibility, easy editorial tools and a transparent, shared, robust workspace. 
• Practice Context Awareness. If you know your audience, you know what they like and can target their specific needs—increasing engagement and conversion to sales.
• Integrate eCommerce. Monetize your content, by offering subscriptions and products to enrich the reader experience with books, multimedia and tools that make your readers’ lives easier.
• Provide Data and Research. Offer additional resources that support your readers and deepen their knowledge.
• Offer Lists, Events and Directories. Aside from your baseline lead generation opportunities and ads, build a community around events, webinars and targeted directories.