What if you woke up tomorrow morning, turned on your station and heard the weather forecast from the weekend? What would you do? I know what I would do…I would freak.
Who was responsible for this?
Why aren’t they paying more attention?
My audience needs to trust that I am delivering them quality and timely content.
You wouldn’t accept old and stale information on your station, so WHY would you accept it on your website? Too often I go to websites for media companies and see an outdated contest, a holiday photo slideshow in MARCH or maybe even an event that the station was involved with LAST YEAR.
There is no way you would accept this type of thing on your station, so why then would you accept it on your website.
Here are a few easy steps to take to make sure the information on your website is as fresh as the information on your station.
1.) Asign a member of your staff to update a blog daily – the blog should live on the homepage and be front and center – if it’s updated continually you want it to be the first thing someone sees when they come to your site. Stress the importance of regular updates to whomever you assign this duty to and make it a requirement that the blog gets updated on the weekends.
2.) Build an RSS reader into your site that will funnel constantly updated information from other blogs to your site. Find a couple of good blogs that are relevant to your audience, subscribe to the RSS feed and away you go. It’s always fresh and it’s very hands off.
3.) Assign a member of your staff the task of coming up with a new photo gallery everyday – it could be “Pictures of John Travolta and his family” or “Obama in transition.” Everyday it should be something fresh and something topical, similar to what you would put on the air. Feature this in a prominent position on your site as it will be good timely content.
Some of these ideas require a little heavy lifting, others not so much. If you don’t have a large staff, maybe #2 is for you. If you are lucky enough to have a full house (in this day and age that might be two or three people) utilize your talent.
Whatever you do, it is important to stress to your team this simple statement, “Treat our website like our station” and you will win everytime!!
