New Media Bytes | Online journalism, web production and promotion

Thanks for visiting New Media Bytes. If you like what you see, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Yoni Greenbaum writes that this year’s presidential election cycle is and will be a big “traffic boon for newspaper websites.” And he’s right! I’ve noticed unique user spikes by the thousands on the nights of presidential primaries and also the morning’s of results. (photo by Just-Us-3)

But scoring users on event nights won’t necessarily mean you can convert casual news surfers to regular site visitors.

“The question seems to be how do you transition an occasional visitor to your site to a regular visitor?,” asks Yoni.

The key? Aggregation!

I’ve long written about cooperation and participating in the conversation. Well, if users expect you to foster the conversation, try being a good host and give them what they want.

Users will likely come to your site for a brief visit to see the headlines and any quick notes that your papers have. Then they’ll likely leave and check another online news site or newspaper website for other angles and stories. Why not help out your readers instead.

Spend some time looking at what other sites are reporting and write a blog post about their articles. Readers don’t have to leave your site to see what others are saying. Instead, they can stick to your elections page where they know you’re keeping tabs on all the stories that they should be reading, even if those stories are being reported by your “competition.” We’re currently aggregating the content from all of our newspapers and stories from the big Detroit papers at the MLive.com Michigan presidential elections coverage.

Aggregate enough and often and you’ll soon create users who will know that to get the good stuff, they need to come to your site. They won’t miss anything if they make your site their morning coffee buddy. Teach your users that, and you’ll likely form a long and lasting relationship.