Increasing Traffic to Your Website
Tips on building a loyal audience for your website.
If you've decided to jump into online publishing -- putting out an online newsletter, a magazine, or website content that will interest your business's customers -- you may think that designing your website is your biggest challenge. But that's the easy part. Much trickier is gathering an audience that will sustain the publication. Here are some tips on building a loyal audience for your site.
Develop Online Connections
The Internet is a surprisingly personal place. A thousand people, each with unique personal interests, can spend the same 60 minutes online together and never come close to crossing paths. It follows that the key to Web publishing success is forging a lasting, personal connection with people based on your own skills, interests, and contacts. The best place to start is with the connections you already have online. Then use those connections to build a community of like-minded people and keep expanding from there.
Create Value
Your goal should be to create unique, valuable information that meets the needs of your targeted audience. On the Internet, there are many ways to provide that information that aren't available to print publishers -- for example, you can offer searchable, interactive databases and encyclopedias. Study the information that is already available in your niche, looking for gaps you can fill. Then, fill the gaps with valuable information nobody else provides.
One online publisher, for example, is creating an online publication about his passion, electric vehicles (EVs). In his spare time (he's a magazine editor during the day), he's been using his skills as a journalist to study the EV market, scoping out who the players are, what they have to say, and how the industry is developing. He also travels to auto shows to test drive new cars, combs the Internet for information about EVs, and studies the technical literature about EV engineering and design. Using all of the connections he has developed and the information he has gathered, he has launched EV World online (www.evworld.com).
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Copyright 2007 Nolo
