The SNO Report: Strategies to grow your online audience

Chances are you’ve invested some serious effort (maybe even blood, sweat and tears) into your site. You’ve worked hard on publishing and designing, and you want to make sure it gets the attention it deserves, right? Although promoting your site to your school and community may seem like a daunting task, it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s a breakdown of four proven strategies to help grow your online audience and generate traffic to your site. Start small with one or two action steps, or dive right in and tackle them all. Need to see some examples? No problem. We’ve linked several throughout.

Strategy: Promote your site on social media. 

Action Steps:

• Start simple. Make sure to link your site on all of your social media accounts.

• Post teasers of stories or new content and prompt social media followers to visit your site to read more.

• Make it a habit to share new content to your social media accounts using your site’s sharing icons. Encourage students to share their newest stories to their own personal social media accounts, too.

• Utilize both posts and stories to increase interaction and encourage followers to visit your site. Share other popular content from your school community, ask for follower input, include polls for followers to take, etc.

Strategy: Make your site a school-wide hub for information.

Action Steps:

• Showcase your school’s sports and clubs. Regularly update sports scores in the Sports Scores tab and include a widget to display them on your homepage. If you subscribe to our Site Booster bundle, build, manage and regularly update your Sports Center.

• Use a Marquee or News Ticker element in the header area of your site to post important school or club announcements, include links to forms and sign-ups, etc.

• Post some type of daily update, announcements link or announcements video for members of your school to view directly on your homepage.

• If you subscribe to the Student News Source App, generate push notifications to send out to your audience for school-specific content.

Strategy: Start a recurring email campaign with content updates. 

Action Steps:

• Set up an RSS email campaign on your site so that each time new content is published, subscribers are automatically notified. MailChimp is our preferred platform for doing so.

• Add an automatic pop-up form and customize its appearance to prompt readers to subscribe upon visiting your site.

• Embed a subscription form throughout your site to increase visibility and signups.

• See if your school will give you permission to automatically subscribe students and teachers. If so, they can always opt out later if they’re uninterested.

Strategy: Create opportunities for engagement, interactivity, and fun on your site.

Action Steps:

• Create and embed forms using either the SNO Form Builder or Google Forms to collect general audience feedback, letters to the editor and story ideas.

• Use the SNO Poll feature to poll your student body on current events and topics.

• Embed different types of multimedia content throughout your site like music playlists, GIFs, flipbooks featuring your print editions, quizzes, and more.

• Take advantage of our recently updated commenting features to interact with your audience. These new tools allow you to like comments, respond to comments, and feature both staff and reader picks, all ultimately showing your visitors that you see and value their feedback.

If this isn’t enough inspiration to get your started, check out some of these other suggestions made by advisers in the SNO network.