10 Great Media Sites: CSO

CSOonline.com, which caters to corporate security professionals, has significantly boosted its audience by adding hard news to the editorial mix. “Until late last year, we didn’t put much emphasis on news,” said Derek Slater, editor in chief of CSO. “Traditionally, we’ve provided thought-leadership content, but we realized that reacting to events is part of readers’ jobs and we needed to put more sheckles on that side of the scale.”

CSO’s Daily Dashboard, which launched in May 2010, provides users with various feeds that allow them to assess threats to corporate security, which can range from network issues to weather impacting data centers. It also provides a new advertising vehicle allowing sponsors to run RSS feeds next to the editorial feeds.

Since its debut, Daily Dashboard has helped to spark traffic, Slater said. Through the first quarter, page views grew 22% compared with the same period in 2010. Overall traffic grew to 182,202 monthly unique visitors, compared with 100,000, during the same period last year.

A new keyword strategy has also played an important role in growing the site’s audience, Slater said. “It’s not just about people finding articles on our site, but across the Web. So it’s a systematic approach rather than slapping some keywords on an article.”