Can A News Feed Boost Your Traffic?
You have a fantastic product or service and you have built a dynamic website highlighting that. Visitors can easily navigate to find exactly what they want. Your customer service features are fast and effective. The problem is, no one seems to be finding your website. You wonder, why isn’t your website getting more traffic?
There is so much competition on the internet these days. With low-cost websites that are up and running in minutes, even unique products can have multiple manufacturers vying for business. It’s important that your website be the one customers know and trust. You have to go beyond that and develop features that attract and keep visitors coming to your site.
One area you may not have considered is adding a news feed. More and more people are getting their news from the internet, and by creating a feature that directly responds to this, you are adding value to your site that will draw in visitors. Read on for ideas that answer the question, can a news feed boost your traffic?
Why A News Feed Is A Great Feature
A news feed that is targeted towards a certain market can bring traffic to your site free of charge. What’s better than free? You’ll have to do some research and submit your feed to feed directories and search engines, but from there, the mighty word search takes over. You will see increased traffic through which you can develop an online loyalty as your news feed presents relevant and timely articles. Those loyal customers will repost your content on social media and build your customer base with little effort on your part.
Everyone gets too many emails these days. Between junk mail and mail from subscriptions, people are paying less and less attention to their inbox. This is the brilliance of the news feed. Instead of sending out too-frequent emails, you can update your customers and followers on the feed. And updating with your news feed gets customers to your website without them needing to remember your URL.
Creating A News Feed
Still in doubt? That’s ok, because setting up a news feed is not difficult. You can try the news feed and see if it yields the expected results. There are many online tools you can use to create a feed. Many website hosts include ways to add news feeds, or your webmaster can certainly create (or cut and paste) code into your website to create the feed.
Next, you must determine the content of your news feed. Ideally, your news feed will integrate the purpose of your website with relevant content. You need readable articles related to your products or services. There are news feed services, like Yahoo, that will curate content for you. However, to really make your news feed stand out, you will want to personalize the information reaching your audience. For example, product reviews are always relevant to new customers. These can be posted and periodically reused in your feed.
You can also create new content around your products or services. If you are a travel agent, you can have a story on the most luxurious airlines. If you are a journalist, a news feed can create a devoted list of followers. One journalist who is successful at using a news feed is Alison O’Riordan, who uses her feed to post articles she has written. By compiling her articles in one place, O’Riordan is building a fan base that appreciates her writing and the subjects on which she writes.
If you aren’t comfortable creating the content for your news feed, there are companies that will do it for you. These online content creators can help you develop an effective strategy for developing and maintaining your feed.
Once it’s online, be sure to create a news feed icon for visitors to subscribe. The program will notify them whenever you update the feed. Then, as mentioned above, you will want to submit your feed to directories and search engines so new visitors can find you.
Finally, you will want to track the news feed’s effectiveness. There are products online that will do that for you. Known as a feed reader or news aggregator, this tool tells you how the headlines you post create click-throughs to your site.
A news feed is an incredibly effective way to increase traffic to your website. With minimal effort, you can create and track the results as the number of visitors increases. You have a lot to gain, so give it a go.