Reaching your audience in the digital space can be difficult. Don’t let these common website management challenges hinder your success. Improve your potential for online engagement by recognizing the following pitfalls, and learn how to overcome them.
Challenge 1: Neglecting your content plan
Not having a robust content plan in place can make it difficult to track the results of your efforts. It can also impact your posting schedule, leaving you scrambling for new ideas and material. These factors can lead to a decrease in site traffic. Consider the following tips to improve your own approach to publishing digital content.
Be sure to set goals and KPIs to measure the success of your digital efforts. Knowing your initiatives ahead of time can help ensure that every piece of content you publish serves a purpose and supports your overall goals.
Maintain a consistent schedule. Posting at regular intervals sets an expectation with your members, and ensures they’ll keep coming back to engage with your content. Planning topics ahead of time on a content calendar can make it even easier to stick to a schedule.
Be sure to vary topics and formats to ensure your material stays fresh and relevant. Incorporate images, blog posts, videos, and audio files into your plan to mix it up and keep your audience engaged.
Challenge 2: Cumbersome Sign-Up Forms
Has your contest participation been dropping off recently? Including too many required information fields on your entry forms could be hurting your conversion rate. While it’s easy to customize your contest and subscription forms in order to collect information for your database as well as for your sponsors, asking for too many details creates a more difficult barrier for entry that can deter audience participation. Studies have repeatedly shown that the more fields you require the user to fill out, the less likely they are to complete the form and submit it.
In order to improve conversion results, consider asking for minimal required information whenever possible on registration and entry forms. Email should always be a requirement so that you know who to contact and where to send mailings. Here are the other required criteria we recommend including in your entry fields to improve your content and ad strategies:
- Zip code
- Age
- Gender
Challenge 3: Poorly Optimized Web and Mobile Content
Don’t let poorly optimized content chip away at your online traffic. When posting material to your website, keep in mind that most people won’t wait more than 3-5 seconds for a page to load. More and more site traffic is coming from phones and tablets, and many of these mobile devices use metered data plans, which typically don’t load fast. Not optimizing your site for both web and mobile can result in frustration for your audience, so they may abandon the page before engaging with your content. It’s also worth noting that Google has been known to prioritize sites that load faster, which means you could also be sabotaging your own search engine rankings.
Keep your load times lower by refraining from publishing essential information in PDF format. Also, while it may be tempting to upload photos and images directly from your smartphone, they’re likely not optimized for web and will typically be very large. Resizing your images can make a huge difference.
Consider using a free online photo editor from the list below to resize images:
To see our full list of 8 common website challenges and learn how to overcome them, you can watch a quick 30-minute webinar on the topic by clicking the button below.
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