Yesterday I visited again with Sara Kauk from Design Missoula about redesigning The Madisonian website. The whole redesign is really centered around how to make the website look better and get more traffic. Generating web traffic is a frustrating task. It's so important and expectations get lofty. We know we can do better on www.madisoniannews.com and we're sure we can do far better with outpostevents.net.
Solutions seem to be varied and everyone has good ideas. The problem for small newspapers like ours is figuring out how to create the time to dedicate to website development and promotion. And better than SEO optimization, or keyword manipulation is direct promotion. A case in point - a few weeks back wildfires popped around Madison County and we were in a breaking news/blogging situation. I posted updates frequently on our facebook site and then tracked the analytics on the homepage. I didn't see much of a bump. So I sent out a mass email to about 90 people. Bang. We were over 1,000 page views by the day's end - the most we'd seen ever. The other thing that seems to get a bump in traffic is other people helping with promotion. If a friend and the local chamber of commerce sends around a link to a story on our website, we see a positive uptick in traffic.
So now we're trying to take that lesson in promotion and recreating it again and again.
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