Your website is the center of your digital publishing universe, promoting your brand 24/7. It’s where your devoted audience follows and engages with you, and new leads find you. But the work week is crazy, deadlines are looming and website renovation projects get shelved for another day.
If you don’t pay close attention to it, your website might be working against you. Do you truly understand your magazine’s web traffic, or do you just trust your gut? Consider that your web visitor’s concerns may not be what you think they are.
Audit your website and maximize what it can do for you.
Does management personally review your magazine’s website on a regular basis? it’s a good idea to have a review by the whole team often. Is you website giving your customers’ the experience you want them to have?
Look for ways to improve the customer journey. Your website must be user-friendly, search-friendly, helpful, and relevant. De-clutter! Make it faster! Allow easy access to lead generation forms (newsletter signups, for example) on the page and side bars. And as you hone your website, think about new and different ways to engage your readers.
10 quick ways to actively engage customers today:
- Forums, blogs and LinkedIn groups are a good source for discovering questions, concerns or topics of interest posed by your audience. Then deliver that niched content to your audience!
- Publish your landing page to a Facebook tab in order to capture social fans.
- Create an e-newsletter, e-book or white paper that is helpful, useful and relevant. Re-purpose content!
- Create multiple e-newsletters or e-books based on specific areas of interest to your audience. Niche your niche!
- Visuals and video are extremely important to grab readers’ attention. Look for new areas to add downloadable infographics, webcasts and more.
- When leads visit certain sections on your website, re-target them on Facebook or the web and offer a free guide e-book or e-newsletter in exchange for their email address.
- When prospective leads subscribe to your e-newsletter on a certain topic, send a print subscription offer that highlights your content on that topic.
- If a lead is acquired through a quiz/polls/surveys or a contest, be sure to let them know about your next one.
- Customize your 404 error pages. Don’t settle for the default look and feel. Even if readers reach a dead-end, they know what to do to get what they are looking for, and it’s a chance to show off your brand personality.
- Add a chatbot to engage visitors quickly.
So every week, without fail, ask yourself–how’s my website doing?
Editor’s note: This post has been updated from the 2017 original.
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About this blogger: Diana Landau is the Content Wrangler for Niche Media. A former sales director and corporate marketing hack, she has now found nirvana in writing and wrangling quality content. Diana is a food, wine, art and SF Giants enthusiast…who sometimes gets carried away.
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