Tips on implementing your Web site

A web site can provide an opportunity to expand your audience—if you know how to build and market it.

by Halley Stith
Intern, IndustryWeek

One-third of all U.S. business will be connected to the Internet by the year 2000, Forrester Research predicts. In just four years, 90 million people signed on to the Internet. Publishers are seeing this as an opportunity to enhance brand awareness and revenues.

This was the issue discussed at a recent ASBPE luncheon at Advanstar Communications, Middleburg Heights, Ohio, by representatives from USA Chicago, a Chicago-based marketing and communications company, and from Pilotstone, a Chicago-based consulting firm specializing in the design and implementation of extranets.

Editors and publishers face a series of challenges once they decide to build a Web site, the speakers said, including:

1. continually generating fresh, timely editorial,
2. getting readers to the site and make them repeat visitors, and
3. creating additional revenue, augmenting the print publication, not hindering it.

To successfully develop a Web site, the trade magazine must

• analyze how the web site will be beneficial to the publication;
• identify the need or opportunity that a Web site would fill;
• develop a strategy for meeting that need;
• ensure all information on the site is well organized and easy to use; and
• develop a plan for revenue growth.

Four Ways To Register Your Site

Once the Web site is clearly designed and meets the needs of both its internal and external audiences, the next step is to generate traffic by registering your URL with various search engines. There are several ways to do this:

1. register the site yourself with each search engine, which may take one person several days;
2. find a free service that will offer a cheap but limited amount of multi-site registration;
3. pay an outsider to do the listing, providing a full service registration of 100+ search engines; or
4. buy software that automates the registration service.

Yet this is not enough to generate heavy traffic. The trade magazine should print the web address on everything from letterhead to business cards to the cover of the magazine, and ask the sales force to spread the word. Establish multiple entry points. Reciprocal linking (informal arrangement between two companies) and commercial linking (formal arrangement) both will generate more hits.

Timely information keeps users coming back. USA Chicago recommends that if a publication is printed monthly, the corresponding Web site should be updated weekly, and a weekly publication's Web site should be updated daily.

Many editors face what Dave Beerzak of Pilotstone calls the "content management crisis" when they hear this. How can they possibly afford to create this much material, this frequently, with their current resources?

Streamline Production Process

Beerzak recommends focusing on streamlining the production to save time and money. One solution he offers: use software to automate the magazine to Web production by creating a form that uses the Web for production, then funnels the material to the Web and/or print. When editors need to upload an article, they fill out and "submit" a password-protected form. This reduces phone and fax costs and saves time.

With regard to the future of communications media, Beerzak suggests, "It's not going to get easier, it's going to get harder." He predicts that print, radio, television and the Internet will all develop into one medium, meaning publishers will virtually be reinventing the wheel again. Remember, that's an opportunity, not a threat.

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