The SNO Report: Strategies For Promoting Your Website

How do you promote your publication’s website to get more of an audience? That’s the question one journalism adviser posed to SNO’s Facebook group, which came running to the rescue with answers.

Let’s review some of their strategies that you, too, can use for your sites:

• “Talk to other teachers. Maybe they can create an assignment for their classes that requires them to get information from the paper.”
• “Instagram — (posting) daily, sometimes twice a day.”
• “I have my students post on their own social media accounts, in addition to posting on our official accounts. We post across all platforms and the school shares our posts on the school’s Facebook account. I have it as a weekly homework assignment.”
• “Last year, during distance learning, my students published online only. They had multiple stories per day — up to 20 per week. They developed a newsletter listing selected stories and posted to each grade’s (and faculty) Schoology page.”
• “Get an email service like Mailchimp, ask the school for permission to subscribe every student and teacher (they can opt out later) and email them when you publish a new story.” (Learn more about using Mailchimp with SNO for subscriptions.)
• “Talk to your coaches about giving you a list of who made the teams on your various teams. Make them available online on the school newspaper, so that students will go to your site.”
• “If the goal has been to help inform readers, we try to go where our students are.”
• “To grow our Instagram audience, we would find people in class who have many followers. Someone would open up our account and ask those people to follow everyone who was a student. The etiquette is to follow back.”

Use some of these teachers’ ideas of networking, social media usage and email newsletters to bring a bigger audience online.