How to drive more traffic to News website
Do you have an online newspaper website? Are you struggling to drive traffic to your news website?
Today starting an online news website is easy even for beginners, but you need to work harder to maintain it. You need to invest for better quality content, SEO, social media sharing and much more to keep your website standard high. Moreover, it would be best to have page views and engagement to make their coverage pay off.
So if you are looking for effective ways to drive more traffic to your news website, then you just got lucky to read our article. So, head on to explore some of the exclusive techniques that will help you drive traffic to your website.
1. Write Genuine Content
A true story can drive the audience to your website and help to maintain credibility. So, you should investigate, scrutinize and validate the news before reporting it.
It would be best if you practised traditional journalism while sticking to the principles of good journalism. Try to write standard news articles explaining the story using Who, What, Why, When and How criteria. You must keep the content clear and balanced on all sides. The most crucial point is to never copy from other websites.
Besides creating content, you must categorize your news based on Breaking News, Brief, Long News, Discussion Page and many more.
2. Write Compelling Headlines
Headlines are one of the most vital parts of your content. Your news story will go unnoticed without a captivating headline. So it would help if you mastered the art of headline writing. Here are some tips for writing News headlines:
Write a set of different headlines before finally choosing the one that will drive the most traffic.
Use active voice in your news headline to indicate what is happening currently. The passive voice is weaker and blunt as it put unnecessary words before the actual event.
Curate keyword-rich headlines that convey the news topics.
Capitalize words carefully in a headline. If you are among many who use the title case in a headline, you must never capitalize the articles. You can also try another style where you can capitalize the first word and proper nouns.
3. Say No to Evergreen Content
When it comes to blogging websites, evergreen content is perfect for getting ranked on Search Engines. However, regarding news websites, evergreen content hardly matters. In the world of news, anything that matters is all about time. Timely content makes it to the top for news articles explaining the relevance of the word ‘news’. It would help if you published articles regularly and most preferably, at an hourly pace to get more traffic.
4. On-Page SEO
Well, like every other website, on-page SEO is very important to a news website too. Make sure your page and content is well optimized, focus on long-tail keywords. You must make the most use of image alt text, provide proper meta description and good internal linking within your content. All these steps will play a significant role in boosting your website traffic. It could help increase your organic traffic.
5. Use Social Media
Social media is the most powerful tool that helps to reach out to millions. You can effectively utilize real-time platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to cover these events. Encourage reporters to post updates on Facebook or Twitter while providing a link that takes followers to publication’s website to read more.
6. Use “Click to Tweet” Links
Click to Tweet is another best technique that enables to utilize the power of Social media. It is one of the best ways to get more shares from your content. Allow your visitors to share any tweetable part of your content. You can easily create a link for your tweetable content using ClickToTweet.com. Visit the website and paste your content. Next, the website will generate a link for your content. Include the link created by the website in your content.
7. Email Blasts
You can keep your readers notified about every breaking news in real-time by sending an email blast. Every time you update breaking news stories on the website, readers can receive alerts on their gadgets.
An email newsletter database of readers interested in receiving breaking news alerts is a great resource. Make sure to keep the alert emails brief within a limit of 100 words. Also, provide well-written text in present tense along with the sound source.
8 . Avoid Paywall near Breaking News
Paywalls are one of the best strategies to encourage readers towards subscription. However, it would help if you excluded this tool around a “Breaking News” arena of your website. To attract visitors, you can allow them to access breaking news coverage for free. Breaking news covers the critical event and to serve your community at large you must let the public access breaking news for free. You can also bring down the Paywall as a whole for a particular period such as during natural calamity or on election night.
Now It’s Your Turn!
I hope this post revealed some cool strategies and tips on how to increase traffic to your news website. Besides these strategies, you must also ensure that your website is built on a premium quality WordPress theme and not just any ordinary free themes. Premium WordPress themes like The News-Times WordPress theme are well-coded to make website function efficiently and drive more traffic to websites than websites built on free WordPress themes. So we highly recommend opting for a paid WordPress theme for your website.
You may also like to read our article on how to monetize news websites.
