11 Take Home Tips from NTC09 on How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Some of the staff here at Connecting Up Australia have recently returned from a trip to San Francisco where they attended an annual Nonprofit Technology Conference hosted by Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) http://www.nten.org/ntc Apart from receiving some of the greatest hospitality the US had to offer, our staff were afforded the opportunity to hear great minds illuminate some very real technology issues facing the world today.

We heard Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/ a futurist, talk about the power of social media and the impact it will have on how we communicate in the coming years, and Eben Moglen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen a computer programming language designer come crusader for free software, talk about the issues arising from free as opposed to proprietary software usage.

Not only did these speakers inspire great debate on such issues, there were many other motivating speakers in the breakout sessions. These speakers provided not just philosophical viewpoints and discussion topics, but excellent ideas and practices for nonprofits to employ on return to their day jobs.

We have listed below some take home tips from the NTC Conference on how you can generate more interest as well as increase traffic to your website. And don’t forget, the spinoff of a good website with a clear message is potential supporters/members/fundraisers for your cause.

• Ensure you have an internet strategy ie ask yourself what are you trying to achieve, how will you accomplish your goals and ensure your website remains dynamic in terms of content and appearance.

• Try to ensure your organisation is the information source of choice for your mission which requires maintenance and updated content.

• Add a Favourites or Bookmark This Page option to some pages of your site.

• Ensure your branding is consistent across your website eg colours, tagline, logos etc

• Put your web URL address on all marketing materials including e-communications, print communications, voicemail etc

• Ensure you employ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques which is the process of increasing traffic levels to your website via the search engines. To do this your organisation may be eligible to receive a grant at http://www.google.com.au/grants/

• See what changes you may wish to make to your website by going to Website Grader http://website.grader.com/ which is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how your website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

• Listen to the people you serve. Perform web searches on your organisation outside of your own URL addresses to see what people are saying about you.

• Register multiple versions of your domain name.

• Try to collate as many email addresses as possible by providing an easy email list signup, asking or even persuasion (ie it lessens the environmental impact by not having to communicate via print)

• Minimise spam – always post unsubscribe link and try to ensure your email addresses are white listed.

The above tips have been sourced directly from speakers at the above mentioned NTC Conference http://www.nten.org/ntc and we wish to thank NTC for providing such relevant and practical solutions for nonprofits globally.

By Josh Goodwin

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