By James Thomas, McVay New Media
Growing audience is important to any station, but it is becoming more and more important online. There are so many free resources that you can use online to promote your station to your local market and to the online community. It is important for you to keep organized and be consistent when trying to grow your sites traffic.
The first and most important step is to make sure you are using meta tags correctly with your web sites. Make sure to generate meta tags that include keywords that are relevant to your station. Sit down with your programming staff to brainstorm keyword ideas, use station call letters, names, promotions and on air personalities so you can be found any way someone might search you online.
The description of your meta tag should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases on this page. If you include keywords that aren’t used on the webpage, you could hurt yourself. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title.
Creating a strong page title is important to have when being search over the web. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many “filler” words from the title, such as “the,” “and,” etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>1079 WDMO – West Virginias Best Music</TITLE>.
The next step is to submit your stations URL to the important Web search engines that robotically index the Web. Look for a link on the search engine for “Add Your URL.” The most used search engines are: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, and Ask.com. Some of these feed search content to the other main search engines and portal sites.
You will also want to seek out to some key radio and Internet radio directories. These sites are a resource to Internet users for finding music that they want to listen to. This will not only help you drive new listeners to your site but it will also make your stations site rank higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Using social networks like Myspace, Facebook and Blogger will help you connect with users in your geographic area and beyond. These sites will help your station network with listeners. Promote your accounts online to your listeners and use these accounts to bring traffic to your site, not away from it. Assign one person at your station as director of online listener relations. This person is responsible for keeping the social networks up to date, adding new friends and returning messages and comments. The more you interact with your virtual audience the better.
Below you will find helpful links and references that you can use during your venture to grow your online audience. It is important to keep up on your online marketing. For more information on how to grow your online audience call James Thomas.
Radio Station Directory Sites:
•Radiotower.com
•Streamfinder.com
•Penguinradio.com
•Radio-directory.com
•Yahoo.com/directories
•Google.com/directories
•Mynetradio.com
•Soundoptions.org