Show your Web Contents to all

Show your Web Contents to all

Driving traffic to a website or encouraging as many people as possible to see the contents are not always the same. Too often, we as website owners live and die by web analytics applications. We fret about bounce rates, unique visitors and dwell time. However, when we focus so heavily on the performance of our website, we miss a fundamental point: we should aim to expose users to our content, not our website. The website is a tool to showcase our content, but it is not the only tool that does this.

The content matters, not the website. That is why each company provides numerous ways to access its content beyond the website.  The lesson here is obvious: as website owners, we need a broader Web strategy to release our content from the shackles of our websites. Below are some opportunities that you can integrate into your online strategy.

1. Target The Desktop
Using a platform such as Adobe AIR, you can easily put Web-based content and functionality onto the desktop. This is exactly what eBay did when they recognized the necessity, and it has proved very successful among the company’s power users.

As a website owner, you should consider whether a desktop application is right for you. Do your users need desktop features, offline access or better integration with the operating system?

2. Going Mobile
It won’t be long before the Web is accessed by more mobile users than PC users. In many countries, this has already happened. Traditional websites often render poorly or are hard to use on mobile devicesHere are some methods of delivering content on the mobile Web:

  1. Create a mobile website: Mobile websites take into account small screens, different input devices and the numerous other unique characteristics of the mobile Web.
  2. Use text messaging: Text messaging is ideal for notifications and updates. It is a perfect complement to your website and a way of keeping users informed.
  3. Build mobile applications: Mobile platforms such as the iPhone and Android make it increasingly easy to build applications that run directly on mobile devices. They allow you to make your content available even when the user is not connected to the Internet or away from their PC.

3. Start Tweeting
Twitter has so much hype at the moment. However, it does provide a unique opportunity to reach a larger audience with your message. The question is, how best to use it? Some organizations use Twitter as a broadcast tool, turning it fundamentally into an alternative to RSS. An example of this is BBC News or CNN, which provide latest updates via the service.

4. Write For Others
Writing for other websites is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate expertise and spread message to a larger audience than would otherwise be possible through your own website.

Do not limit your words of wisdom to your own website. Look for other editorial websites and blogs that speak to your own audience and offer to write for them. After all, your audience visits many websites other than your own. Any article you write for others should be more than shameless self-promotion. The owners of those websites will want quality content that fits their website and is of interest to their audience.

5. Embrace Facebook
Another option for expanding your Web strategy beyond the website is Facebook. Explaining the importance and reach of Facebook is surely unnecessary. However, you may be tempted to dismiss it because your target market is not teenagers, who are normally associated with these kinds of social networks.

6. Offer Better Feeds
Not all approaches to putting content in front of more users have to be as time-consuming and complex as developing an API. Doing one other thing could increase your views within minutes.

Users increasingly rely on RSS feeds to consume content from websites. This is especially true for news, articles and blog posts. However, some website owners are so obsessed with driving traffic to their websites that they provide only teasers of their posts via RSS. To read a whole article, the user is forced to click through to the website.

To maximize users’ exposure to your content, ensure as much of it as possible is displayed in the RSS feed itself. Require users to click through only when absolutely necessary.

7. Use Multimedia
Limiting your content to the written word is becoming increasingly unnecessary. Creating audio and video content has become a trivial task. Services such as YouTube and applications such as AudioBoo make production and hosting easy.

Your content has to be appropriate to your target audience. Shock tactics may work well with a teenage audience but may not go down so well with middle-aged business executives!

8. Don’t Forget Email
Amidst all this talk of video, audio and APIs, it is easy to forget the tools we have always had for reaching beyond the confines of our website. Although not the sexiest tool on our list, email had to make it on before the end of this post. Email should be a key tool for keeping your content in front of users. Obviously, email can be used for a lot more than syndicating content. However, for the purposes of this article, it can be used to subscribe to your content. If users can subscribe to your content via RSS, they should be able to do it also via email.