5 Tips to Boost your Newspaper Website Traffic

Many moons ago, you decided to start an online newspaper. You prepared everything down to the nitty gritties, built your website, and it was all a walk in the park.

Fast forward to the present - you find yourself going through the site statistics about ten times each morning, only to find that it’s just your family that’s been reading your articles. What’s going on? Where are the readers, where’s the traffic? Everything’s been done correctly, and you’ve even been making the effort to publish articles daily. One Google search later, you stumble upon this article.

Attracting traffic to your online newspaper is no magic act, but it is based on a set of specific actions.

How To Launch Your Target Traffic Into Space

Here are five key tips to increase traffic easily, and for free.

1. Focus On The Correct Readers

The first challenge is to help someone who’s really interested in your article to find your piece of the Internet. Not all traffic is identical; meaning to say, it won’t all generate profit for your business, and this is why it is important to reach the correct, and not just any, readers. If you have thousands of viewers but none of them are remotely interested in your content, you might as well have none.

An initial piece of advice is to define your customer personas. We wrote an article about this - you’ll find it handy. If this phase is done well, writing will come much easier; your words will be the ones that your target audience wants to read. Take all the time you need to research what the audience wants. Time taken to write an article that is not relevant for your readers is a very expensive waste of time.

In the case of your newspaper, what you want is for your readers to find it attractive enough to want to share it and come back to it, becoming loyal subscribers.

2. Write The Perfect Articles

The perfect article is simply great quality content that engages readers. Provide useful, informative, interesting, and consistent content in your articles. This post delves deeper into the ingredients of great content and gives some great tips.

Always keep your audience in mind. Convey your desire and passion to keep them informed. This is not only done with words, but even more so with the media you use to attract them. As the well-known, Chinese proverb says, “ A picture is worth than a thousand words” - don’t underestimate the value of images and media, and make your articles eye-catching to your readers before they have even begun reading.

Keep in mind that when you write something really well and your users notice this, they will immediately look forward to telling everyone what they have read. This is what you want! Word of mouth has withstood the test of time as the best method of free advertising in the history of marketing.

Always stray from the norm, and strive to come up with unique, creative solutions.

3. Optimize Everything You Do

Optimization is not just SEO! There are various other methods that you can employ to optimize your newspaper; in the ideal scenario, you would make use of all of them.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the technical process that helps webpages rank better in search engines such as Google or Bing. If you want to read more about this, I recommend going through this great guide by Moz.

On the other hand, other factors such as the download speed of your webpage and its responsive (mobile-friendly) design are also crucial. According to statistics, any site has a mere 15 seconds to grasp the attention of its viewers, and a huge majority of these are browsing on their phones.

Don’t forget to optimize your media and content, namely images, videos, infographics, etc. Compressing them as much as possible (without compromising the quality) will make for a much faster website.

4. Don’t Let Your Audience Forget You

Allow me to start by saying that this is not a license to spam readers with your articles. Care about your audience, nurture your readers, and always keep them updated. Frequency and consistency are both imperative. We are lucky to live and work in the age of social media, which is an excellent tool in this regard.

To share your news, use the platforms you consider most useful to or frequented by your personas. Don’t just make and share content, but adapt it to the different places you are propagating it.

Growing an audience, establishing an online presence, and always finding something interesting to say, are together no easy feat. Your target audience is more likely to share your content than any other; the sooner they find you, the faster your site will grow, through your readers’ recommendations.

5. Build Relationships

One very good way of attracting new readers to your newspaper is letting established contributors write some articles, therefore building good relationships with influencers and other newspaper-related websites. This is a very effective way of making a good, lasting impression, encouraging your readers to love and share your work. You will experience the luxury of being introduced to thousand of readers through them, because of their powerful position on internet.

Remember

You are unique, as is your newspaper. Your way of working is your own. Take these five tips and mould them whichever way they work best for you. You’ll be growing an audience before you know it.

Remember to monitor your website statistics once you put this advice into practice. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures; use the results to improve your site, your articles, and your approach. Be so good that even your competitors will want to share your articles and recommend your newspaper!