Digital Boomerang Singapore 

It’s easy to launch a website. Any 10-year old can start one. The real challenge is being able to maintain and drive traffic to your site.

Sad to say, most sites are badly maintained. And if you dig deeper, you’ll almost always find that it’s a cost issue. There just wasn’t enough money budgetted to maintain or drive traffic to a website.

So what happens? Sites stay online and collect cobwebs. No one visits or knows about the website. The freshly baked site turns stale. User complaints trickle then pour in while an apologetic customer service officer (if any) promises improvements that never materialise.

Think it’s exaggerated? Recently, a newspaper reported that a UK Government website received only 77 visitors for an entire year.

So in the midst of the website launch fever, look into the following to prevent site degradation.

The Maintenance Team

At the very minimum, you need to have a content, service and technical team. In maintenance mode their jobs are to:

• Audit - ensure site features are working, expires outdated content, archives old content, etc.
• Respond - reply to users, set up an online customer service, grow your FAQs, etc.
• Review - analyse user feedback and web statistics to decide which features to build, promote, demote, improve, etc.
• Fix - fix bugs, make corrections to content, fix broken links, etc.

The Return Visitors Team

The basic principle of marketing is that it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one. But no customer will return if there isn’t anything waiting for them.

Several surveys have shown that users return mainly for content (e.g. SurveySite.com and Forrester Research). At the bare minimum, this team needs to look after the content.

Community is oft cited as another very important element. Just have a look at 43things.com, Flickr.com and MySpace.com to understand how the web has evolved from a pure broadcast medium to a social network.

This team:

• New Content - Produces new, timely and updated content, blogs, newsletters, etc.
• Fosters Community - Through polls, surveys, quizes, forums, content-sharing, etc.
• Drives Database - Ensures community, new content and marketing are integrated with database acquisition.

The Traffic Team

“Build it and they will come”. If you are still of this mindset, you are completely out of the game. Getting users to visit your site is no small feat. Staying top of mind, is even harder.

You need to spend time, money and resources to promote your site.

This team

• Markets - draws up online and offline marketing plan and executes the plan according to budget from ensuring all collaterals bear your website address to buying banner advertisements.
• Search Engine Watch - submits to search engine and monitors search engine positioning.
• Partnerships - finds suitable partners to drive mutual traffic.

At the very minimum, you will need one person dedicated to managing your site. If you are really on a tight budget, think of creative ways to achieve your goals.

• Find partners to provide content to you.
• Use your marketing dollars to produce advertorials which can also be reused on your site as content.
• Use services like netmechanic.com to help with monitoring, maintenance and website promotion.

Share This