Learn how a website for your NEWSPAPER can increase circulation, generate more advertising revenue and *substantially* improve your bottom line. Coastal Technologies / WebsFirst, Inc. -- Web designers, website design for NJ, NYC, NY state and USA. E-commerce and e-buisness solutions are our specialty.

There are many benefits to having an effective web site and Internet marketing strategy. They can be summarized in one simple sentence.

You'll make more money!

If you have a web site that's not making money for you, then one or more of the following is true:

the site is poorly designed
the site lacks revenue generating features
your Internet marketing strategy is incomplete
your strategy is not being fully implemented

Our free website strategy analysis will help determine the problem areas and develop a course of action to eliminate them.

Here are basic ways you can enhance your bottom line:

attract new advertisers
sell more to existing advertisers
develop new revenue streams
increase circulation
reduce operating costs

Your web site should be an active part in achieving all of these objectives.

Communicate

First and foremost, your web site should be collecting the names and email addresses of site visitors. You will be particularly interested in getting your existing readers to join your email list. If you don't know who your readers are, you can't effectively market to them.

Once you have this information, you need to make good use of it. You'll want to send out an email or newsletter weekly or at least monthly. It needs to have interesting content, such as highlighting a story in the new issue of your paper, but it's really an opportunity to sell advertising.

Sell

For a newspaper, your primary product is advertising space. Printed ads in your paper, targeted ads on your web site and ad space in your email broadcasts should all be important revenue streams. If your paper has a paid circulation, then of course increasing your subscriber base generates more direct revenue. Even if your paper is free, increasing circulation and web site traffic will allow you to increase advertising rates.

Inform and Entice

People should have a reason to visit your web site. For starters, articles from the current and past issues should be available online, with a search feature for easy retrieval. Additional "bonus" articles should also be on the web site. You need to give people a reason to come back... because every time they do, you have the opportunity to promote additional products and services for your business or for your advertisers.

In addition to the articles, we'll look into other types of information you can provide on your site, such as a local events calendar and a business/resource directory.

Another source of revenue can come from advertising that appears on your site. Since ads can be tied to particular content sections or resource directory categories, you can promise your advertisers a targeted audience while displaying ads your readers will find particularly useful.

In a nutshell

What we covered here are the basic building blocks of a powerful web site strategy. Most of our plans include quite a bit more than this. To learn more, sign up for a free website strategy session now.