If you work for a small organization, here is an easy method to build up your website traffic. Using my preferred term, it’s an opportunity for you to build brand dimension—easily creating compelling content and getting eyeballs on your activity.
(Preface: As most of you know, the more people you have coming to your website, the greater the opportunity to showcase your brand in an immersive experience. It allows you to sell tickets, provide valuable information, or simply entertain visitors. I recently set out to improve the website traffic for Portland Piano International. The process is certainly not a new concept, but rather one that small nonprofits have difficulty implementing with small budgets.)
Create a blog
The first step in pulling people to your website—create a blog with regularly released content. You can easily build this into most existing websites use templates. For example, if you use a WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace system, there are easy ways to plug a blog into the website. Just search your platform’s help center (if you’re doing the job) or contact your web developer.
Fill the blog with new and recycled content
Look at Portland Piano’s blog I created a few months ago. We launched it at the end of October 2017 and it took some time to build up content. We’re still in the process, but it’s been exciting to see the brand dimension added to the communications/marketing mix that previously didn’t exist.
There’s a mix of new and recycled content. The new content includes some articles written by a local Portland blogger. There’s other content re-tooled from artists’ existing collateral and collected into one place for easy access. This includes press quotes, tidbits about the next performer, videos of them performing, etc.
Distribute the content to email and social media platforms
After the content is created or re-tooled, distribute it across all your channels like email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Include the link and the headline or brief description.
Watch the people come running
Track the progress of each article in the metrics section of your website or on Google Analytics. You’ll most likely be pleasantly surprised with the increase in traffic.
Here’s an example of one campaign in action. I published this piece on Portland Piano’s blog highlighting one of their upcoming concerts featuring Lukáš Vondráček. Then I distributed the link on social media and in their weekly e-blast. View the e-blast to see how I implemented the blog post content to drive people to view the full version on the website.
Within 24 hours of the distributed piece, we saw a large uptick in website traffic. Hence, there was also an uptick in the click-through rate for their weekly e-blast.
