Ideas for driving traffic to a website

[phanio]

I think you were hinting at this in your last post - but, you need to develop a formal marketing plan. One that will help you identify who you are targeting and how to get in front of them - if you plan to target businesses - then you might be on the right track - but, if you are planning to targeting the population at large and want the local businesses to advertise then you have to target the same people the businesses target - thus they will be inclinded to advertise - to get in front of their customers.

Would suggest you research a marketing plan or get some free help from SCORE or SBDC.

[prova.fm]

Hi Blessed,

I just read this today, & it's been several months. Any update on the paper? I'd love to hear what worked best at driving customers to your online version. I'm trying to attract small business customers to my online site as well, & I'm researching what works best.

Thanks,
-David

[Blessed]

Hi David -

We're still kicking around the idea of a direct mail piece to our former mailing zip codes - we have a few advertisers who are interested in footing part of the bill in order to be included on the piece so... we'll see. So far we're just continuing to pass out business cards, writing more articles about local businesses so that they have a reason to point their customers to our site and etc... it's working - slow and steady, but it's working.

[bizjunkie]

Glad to hear that it is working. I guess that is really the key - try things with set goals. If they reach those goals, great - do them again. If not, scrap them and try something else.

Have you been contacting other local media sources like Radio or TV - these groups struggle with content from time to time and might run a free story about you - just help them with the concept fo the story - make it easy for them to wortk with you.

[prova.fm]

Yes. Glad to hear it's working!
Thanks for the reply.

-David

[Patrysha]

Radio (at least in small town environments like mine...can't say for certain that it applies across the board) has a fairly antagonistic attitude against print and to a lesser extent online media. It would be hard to get direct coverage...but there are quite a few ways to get around that...but it does require getting creative.

[RMMarketing]

I have actually had really good luck with Twitter lately. Not too many buyers per say but am getting traffic. I think the key is to really target who you are following and who your follwers. They need to be people who are your target audience.

[handmadejewelry]

Free Press releases are a great way to get noticed online. Submit your news site to the Rss feeds like googlenews, yahoo, associated press... anywhere and everywhere you can. The more places you show up and the more often you post then more people will see you.

Good luck,

[prova.fm]

How exactly do you submit something to Google News? In my experience, they only accept application of an entire site. & it has to meet certain standards (daily updates, multiple authors, news only,...).

[Blessed]

Free press releases are a great way to get noticed online - however... we are a newspaper so we're publishing those press releases and writing our own stories. We aren't trying to make sales - we're trying to build traffic so that advertising space on our site has value.