Question: We have a multi-week turnaround on our content which makes it hard for us to write about fresh news. Is there an easy way to get past compliance, legal, and information only formatting requirements?
Answer: This is in no way legal advice, but here are a few ideas that might work…
If you have this limitation so do most of your competitors, so in that regard it probably does not hurt you much when competing with other large players. If you business model is solid you should still have a similar or higher visitor value. Where it might hurt is competing with smaller players, but since they are smaller they are typically easier to influence.
You can still attract the traffic streams of the smaller players by using affiliate programs, hiring them as consultants, buying ads on their site, sponsoring special reports they create, creating things they would want to talk about (free tools, widgets, etc.).
I am not sure of the legalities of it, but you may also want to turn some of your star content producers into people you are buying ads off of, or spin the content portion of your business off into its own business then work to cross promote, or publish a few independent blogs with legal disclaimers. Look to see what competitors are doing, and if it is legal try to do it better than they do.
Create and sponsor an independent non-profit organization that speaks for your industry. At least one of the non-profit organizations in the search marketing space is a complete joke, but it still helps its leaders gain brand recognition because they are affiliated with it. I bet more than one car donation charity was created by an auction house.
