New: Twitter widget, Email Me and a Sneak-Peek

Hi publishers, here's what's new this week at Paper.li!

New Twitter widget:

Last year Twitter announced that they would be retiring their original API this spring and rolling out a new version (1.1) in order to foster a more consistent Twitter experience across the Twitter eco-system. 

We completed the switchover with no impact on the service, however we were required to retire the older version of the Twitter conversation widget we were displaying on papers.

What does this mean?

Only good news. We made a few changes on our side and now you have the option of creating a Twitter widget and adding it to your paper (or not).

The widgets can be created via your own Twitter account and you determine the content you would like to display. If you prefer not to have a widget on your paper at all, that's an option too.

To get started, simply go to the Add-ons tab under in your paper settings and look for the Twitter widget option.

Like what you see, Email me!

Recently we've seen an increase in readers and visitors to papers contacting us in order to get in touch with publishers. Not very effective, to say the least. So we have created a new widget, "Email me" that will help readers and publishers connect more easily.

Once activated an "Email me" icon will appear next to your profile and your readers can contact you. Of course, we'll send the email on your reader's behalf, keeping your email address concealed until you share it with them yourself.

Sneak-peek: White-label solution

The one feature that PRO publishers have unanimously said they would pay a whole lot more for is the ability to have control over the footer, header and other aspects of branding.

Well, good news! Our Paper.li white label solution will be available in May and you won't have to pay a cent more for it. It will be included in the PRO package at $9 per month (or $99 per year). We'll let you know as soon as it is ready!

Have a great week and be sure to tweet us @smallrivers if we can help you with anything.

New: Google Analytics & PayPal

Pro publishers now you can integrate Google Analytics into your paper and track the stats on your own GA dashboard!

Getting started is easy. Go to your Google Analytics account and add your paper url. Then simply paste the Property ID into the Analytics field located on the Stats Tab in your paper's settings. In about 24 hours you will be able view your paper's activity in your GA dashboard.

If you don't yet have a GA account, you can go to this page to set one up.

PayPal Payment Option

Not a Pro publisher yet? No problem. You can upgrade your paper to Pro from within your paper's settings at any time. And to make upgrading even easier, we've added PayPal as a payment option.

There are a lot of benefits of going Pro and you can view the full list of Pro features here. But here are 5 of my favorite reasons to upgrade:

• total control over advertising units 
• custom domains
• curated email newsletter
• managed notifications
• big bang, low price:  9 USD per paper/per month

If you have any questions about adding Google Analytics, or our Pro package, visit our customer support forum or tweet us @smallrivers. We're always here to answers questions and lend a hand.

New Paper.li Features: AdSense, Buffer and More

Hi Publishers, it's a 'new feature Friday' here at Paper.li and here's what we have for you:

Google AdSense for Custom Domain URLs

We know you've been waiting a while for this feature and are eager to monetize your hard work, so now Pro publishers can add Google AdSense to papers.

Any Pro publisher with a custom domain url configured will see an additional field next to the ad units. Simply enter your AdSense code and ID and you're set. You can learn more about setting up your AdSense here.

Share more with Buffer

A large number of you told us that you enjoy using Paper.li as a part of your morning routine to discover new content for further sharing and distribution. You also told us we weren't making it easy enough to share that content.  So this week we integrated Buffer into Paper.li.

Now you can easily cross-post a single article, video or image, or a paper edition, to pages and profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

To get started you'll need a Buffer account. Once you've set up your account (it's easy to do) just look for the share icon on articles or at the top of a paper to start sharing.

And email too!

You also told us that sometimes you find a story or paper that you'd like to share or send to yourself, but just not publicly. So we've added our good friend 'email' to the sharing portfolio of icons.

Now you can easily via a pop-up window on Paper.li, or choose another email service to send someone content.

Additional Pro payment options

Last, but not least, we've included a few more payment options for publishers who would like to upgrade to Pro. It's now possible to subscribe to Pro with Visa, MasterCard, Amex, JCB and Diner's club.

If you haven't upgraded to Pro yet, take a look at the features and give it a try! We offer a no hassle subscription and you can easily downgrade back to Paper.li basic at any time.

That's it for this week. The team and I wish you a great weekend and if you're out celebrating St. Patrick's Day, tweet us. We love international celebrations!

New! Custom Thumbnails for Your Paper.li

If you haven't taken a look under the hood lately, it's time to sign-in and check our latest feature - custom thumbnails images for your paper.

Custom thumbnails, or 'covers' as we call them,  replace the standard blue Paper.li 'P' on the newsstand as well as the gray 'P' when your papers are posted and shared across social platforms like Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn.

Getting started is simple: go to your 'appearance tab' under settings upload your artwork and save. And remember! Only upload images that you have permission to use.

Have fun customizing and when you have a minute tweet us @Smallrivers and show us your custom covers. We love seeing new features put to work.

Image credit: Surfing legend Laird Hamilton via paddleboarddirect

What's new at Paper.li: custom domains and more!

Keeping true to our new year's resolution of rolling out more of the great features you've been asking for, here's what's new at Paper.li this week:

Custom Domains

As a Pro publisher, you can now apply your own domain name (like YourName.com) to your Paper.li. That's right - away with the funky numbers that are hard to remember!

Applying a custom domain extends your brand presence and makes it much easier for your readers to find the news you publish. Custom domains are simple to implement and we've outlined the steps for you here.


Updated Homepage

Last fall we launched our "No app" project at Paper.li with the goal of redesigning the Paper.li site and newsstand with a responsive design. We started with the most important first, your papers, which received an overwhelmingly positive response from you.

Now we've completed the second and final phase and we're happy to announce that the entire Paper.li site, and newsstand, is 100% responsive in design.

Along with the new design comes a new look and feel and a great big hero space for us to show off you, your papers and how you're using them. Check it out.

Fun stuff

I can't let a the opportunity pass me by to promote #Blogchat Europe! February 12th marks the start of #Blogchat at a time accessible for Europeans: 20:00 CET. This is an outstanding opportunity to meet other European bloggers, exchange knowledge, tip and best practices.

To save the date I've even created a Google event that you can add to your calendar - see you there!

Questions, feedback or ideas? Leave a comment below or tweet the team @Smallrivers. We always love hearing from you.

Join Paper.li for #Blogchat Europe, Feb 12th!

BTW starting next month, the 2nd Tuesday of every month will be an additional #blogchat during day for bloggers in Europe! 1pm CST US!
— Mack Collier (@MackCollier) January 21, 2013

#Blogchat's coming to Europe, so save the date! 

When:      2nd Tuesday every month
Time:       20:00 Central European Time
1st Chat:  February 12th, 2013

For those of you who missed it, Paper.li sponsored Mack Collier's #Blogchat for the month of December. In short, the sponsorship was a huge success and I wrote up my thoughts about our experience here in this post "Engage, and Be Prepared to Wow Yourself" on Mack's blog.

One of the outcomes that really surprised all of us during the sponsorship was the amount of Europeans that joined the chat. Why? Because #Blogchat takes place at Sunday nights at 8pm Central US which is 3am Monday morning, Central European time... no one expected a strong European presence.

Thank you European community, you are awesome! Your participation was impressive and convinced Mack to add #Blogchat Europe to his schedule! He announced it last week in his post on the Community blog.

Beginning February, we can all join Mack at #Blogchat Europe every 2nd Tuesday of the month at 20:00 Central European Time. That's 1pm Central Standard Time for our US friends. This is a great time that works across multiple time zones.

The first chat takes place February 12th, 20:00 CET, so please join us! (Click here to save the date in your calendar) I've been asked to be the guest co-host for this first chat - I can't wait!

If you aren't already following Mack you'll find him @MackCollier and you can find me @KDHungerford. See you February 12th!

PS: If you've never joined a TweetChat before, don't let that stop you! I wrote this post "Getting Started with TweetChat essentials" to help you out.

What to Expect in 2013: More New Features, Less Chocolate

Happy New Year! 15 days into it and we hope all your resolutions are going as planned!

We've retired our holiday hats, cleared the snow out of the office and have started the year off with a bang.

We had a great 2012 here at Paper.li -thank you for being a part of it. And thank you for all the warm holiday wishes that poured in over the holidays. You really spoiled us.

It wouldn't be a "New Year" without a resolution, so thought we'd share ours with you. It's simple: deliver more features and improvements that will help support your marketing needs -- and eat less chocolate. And it appears that the first part of the resolution is going to be a lot easier than the second part.

Depending on when you joined us you may not have experienced all of our milestones in 2012, so here are the highlights of 2012 -- and what's planned for 2013.

Looking back in 2012...

Brand new publishing platform: 

We started off the year with a bang by rolling out our brand new state-of-the-art, carrier grade processing and publishing platform. Built on cutting edge technology, our engineers took on the awe-inspiring challenge of designing, coding and implementing a platform that would carry you and your content needs far into the future --and within the shortest amount of time possible.

To give you an idea of what that means in terms of content: we currently fetch, analyze, filter and present about 225 million articles, videos and photos combined for you on a daily basis.

Responsive paper layout:

We wanted you to be able to access and read papers across all devices, without needing to download apps, so we rolled out our responsive paper view design. Publishers and readers have given the new responsive design, and the updated look and feel,  two thumbs-up. Thanks to all of your for input and feedback to get everything just the way you wanted it.

Paper.li Pro:

Much anticipated and long awaited, Paper.li Pro rolled out for 9$ USD per paper/ per month. Along with Pro came extended branding possibilities, complete control of the advertising space on the paper as well as the ability to review content before notifications are sent out.

We had hoped that the price would work for even the smallest of budgets, and we were thrilled to hear from publishers that we hit the sweet spot with pricing. Pro was greeted with an overwhelmingly warm response and we are so excited to see so many businesses and organizations and audiences benefiting from the new features.

Curated email newsletter:

Email marketing was all the rage last year and will continue to grow even stronger in 2013. We added a full-blown curated email newsletter to our service that delivers the entire front page of content to your subscriber's inbox. Think of it as a "visual RSS" because that's what you're calling it.  Your readers are loving it so keep publishing!

We also handed over the HTML for you to use in your own 3rd party mail client. Nice!


Curated "bundles" of news:

Just before the end of the year we launched our Multi-share (Beta) feature. Multi-share enables anyone visiting a paper to curate and share content collections from a paper, without needing to share the entire paper.

The result is a curated "bundle" of laser focused and relevant news to share with your audience. It's really cool and the community is having a blast delivering these snackable, bite-sized nuggets of content across social networks. Look for more feature enhancements for the Multi-share this year.

Community Blog: 

"For the Community, By the Community" that was my vision when I started the Paper.li community blog and it's held true to its aim.

We exceed expectations and reached over 140,000 views in 2012. The blog is making its name not only as a repository of solid evergreen content on social media tools, tips and best practices but also provides fantastic Paper.li case studies, shining the light on the amazing publishers in our community.

Additionally,  its a working proof of the power of content marketing; provide content that addresses your audiences needs, interests and problems and you'll be rewarded with returning and loyal visitors.

Our team has been completely inspired by all of your contributions to the Community blog. Thank you and keep the great content coming! If you haven't checked it out yet, do so now!

Events: 

One of the most memorable events for Paper.li this year was sponsoring Mack Collier's #Blogchat in December. #Blogchat was an opportunity to hang out with our community, catch up with old friends and meet new ones.

In fact, the event was such a raving success that Mack has decided to start- up "#Blogchat Europe": #Blogchat but on a European time schedule! He announced it today in this post on the community blog - we're so excited!

How awesome is this? Very awesome. This is Twitter's most successful TweetChat and its rolling out to the European community at time we can participate in - 8pm Central European Time!

This Chat will take place the second Tuesday of each month and the first chat is scheduled for February 12th. Paper.li is the guest co-host for the chat! Don't miss it!

Moving forward.... 

Well, this list is shorter because we're only 15 days into the year, but we have a lot more great features and improvement planned for you in 2013.

You can expect to see more Pro features roll out to support small business owners such as domain aliasing and self hosting, even more editorial control over content and layout as well as some additional promotional features...

Be on the look out for Paper.li Google+ hangouts, more TweetChat involvement and some other fun, virtual events.

We love hearing from you, so let us know what you liked, didn't like and would like to have in 2013!  And also let us know what you recommend for keeping chocolate consumption down in a country where it seems to flow like water.

The Team:
Bottom row - David (platform), Me, Iskander (co-founder), Oliver (platform), Birgit (Customer Support)
Top row - Andrej (front-end), Valcu (Infrastructure), Lorin ( Biz Dev), Edouard (co-founder)

Now in Beta! Paper.li Multi-Share

Check out this multi-share from The Taryn Pisaneschi ★ Daily bit.ly/ULVZKlThat's awesome
— Tom(@twodog711) December 19, 2012

We're excited to announce the (beta) roll-out of a brand new feature today, the Paper.li Multi-Share .

This is phase I of a powerful new feature that allows you to curate a selection of your favorite articles, photos and videos from any paper to share with your audience. It's an incredibly quick, easy and efficient way to deliver lazer focused content in just 1 click!

Here's how Multi-share works:

• Hover over any article, video or image on the front page of a Paper.li and you'll see a blue + icon. 
• Click on the icon for each piece of content you'd like to add (sky's the limit!)
• Click "next" and your selected content will appear in a overlay
• Add a comment to your collection
• Share your collection!

It's that easy! (view a Multi-share here!)  Each Multi-share has its own unique url that brings readers back to the originating Paper.li. Content selected for a Multi-share appears highlighted on the paper so you can easily find it.

There's a lot to love about this new feature and since launching just a couple of hours ago, we've seen an incredible amount of Multi-shares already zooming through the Twittersphere.

We can't wait to hear your feedback and are counting on it for phase II of Multi-share. Once you've tried it out tweet us @Smallrivers or leave us a comment here to let us know what you think!

We wish you continued good curation, great publishing and a lot of fun sharing!

What Happens When You Send Out Your Newsletter?

Here's what happens to our traffic every week when we send our newsletter #BlogChat twitter.com/problogger/sta…
— Darren Rowse (@problogger) December 10, 2012

Last night's #Blogchat was huge! (25m impressions) Thanks to everyone who joined the chat and conversation!

There was a tremendous turn-out of bloggers and marketers to share best practices around successful email marketing; interaction, engagement and how to drive traffic. There were multiple take-aways, here are mine:


Numero uno! If email isn't a part of your communication strategy in 2012, make it a priority for 2013! 

Nr. 2: To be successful, you'll need a strategy. Email is not going to work as a stand alone tactic.

Nr. 3: Email is content too! Deliver content that entertains, engages and solves a problem, interest or need. (Be sure to add a little personality, too)

Nr. 4: Be dedicated! Frequency matters and three times a week is too much, once every six months is not enough.

Nr. 5: There are a multitude of tools out there (pay and free) that allow you to easily get started with email. It can be as simple as a Paper.li newsletter digest, or a more sophisticated.

Nr. 6: When done right, email can grow traffic, convert leads and generate sales -- and there are numbers to prove it!

Nr. 7: The #blogchat community holds a wealth of experience and expertise. Reach out and ask questions. Guaranteed you will receive a helpful answers.

If you weren't able to make it, take a few minutes to browse the Hashtracking transcript, the Storify and Mack's Paper.li and let yourself be motivated and inspired by last night's chat. I am! Guaranteed, you'll find the information interesting!

Sunday, December 16th is #blogchat's most important topic of the year -  creating your 2013 blog plan and strategy! Join us! You won't want to miss that one!

Last Night's #Blogchat Rocked! Thanks for Joining Us!

HUGE #Blogchat last night on content curation for companies, possibly the biggest this year, here's the transcript - beta.hashtracking.com/ht-pro-rpt/mac…
— Mack Collier (@MackCollier) December 3, 2012

Thanks to you and the #blogchat community, and according to Mack himself,  last night's #Blogchat was possibly the biggest this year! You can read his analysis and stats breakdown on his latest post. It's a really interesting read!

For those of you who missed it, the topic was "Curation in the Workplace". The turn-out was  spectacular and we had an awesome time chatting and mingling with everyone. Tips, tools and great advice were in abundance and it was a great learning exchange for everyone.

We really loved seeing you all there and would like to say thank you to everyone who participated. We'd also like to give an extra shout-out of appreciation to Swiss Paper.li publisher Evren Keifer who made the 3am CET wake up call to join for #blogchat... that's early!

For those of you who couldn't join in last night, here are a few places where you can go to get the skinny on the chat:

• The #Blogchat transcript: provided by the folks at Hastracking. Yes, that's correct. 27.2 million impressions within one hour!

• The #Blogchat Storify: you'll find some great quotes for presentations, new folks to follow and good resources to dive into. 

• Mack's #Blogchat paper: discover the urls shared during the chat. While you're there, pre-order Mack's new book "Think Like a Rock Star". He explains what it takes to make fans out of followers and that probably has something to do with how he's successfully grown one of the strongest communities on Twitter...

Save the date! The Next chat is Sunday, December 9th, 8pm Central Standard Time (U.S)!

The topic is "Email and blogging" and with both topics topping the charts as two of the most effective content marketing tactics, you won't want to miss it!

We really look forward to seeing you there. Tweet me @KDHungerford for any questions and let me know if you'll be joining! The team and I look forward to greeting you!