How to Optimize Your Station's Online Content on a Budget

Publisher 2017

April 3, 2017

Managing a radio station's online content strategy can be challenging. Whether that includes a single station, or an entire market. To help you overcome this, we've pulled together a number of tips and techniques to create more content with less resources.

Set a Foundation with Style Guides

Building a style guide for your station's online content is critical for your long-term success. Not only does it keep your content consistent, but it allows you to bring more people into the creation process. While it may sound like a heavy lift, if you think of it in these three basic steps, it's easy to execute:

How do you create content?
How do you format your content?
How do you publish it?

When planning your guide, take into consideration your on-air brand, tone-of-voice, and audience interests. If you don't have a clear sense of your audience's interests, just ask! Run surveys and polls to discover what they care about.

To help build the style guide, check out Fontify. It is an easy-to-use web-based tool that allows you create and maintain style guides for free.

Build a Proofreading Process

When you are building your online content, it's important to establish a process for proofreading your work before you hit Publish. If you don't have a teammate available to review, take advantage of free online tools like Grammarly. Grammarly will automatically check for grammar, punctuation, and style to help improve your online content and eliminate mistakes.

Always Add an Image

According to Jeff Bullas, articles with images get 94% more total views than articles without images. Ninety-four percent! Images are an important step to creating a successful online content strategy, but finding the right one isn't always easy. To help overcome this, we have included a list of free stock photos sites and design tools to save your station valuable time and money. Look for photos that are public domain or licensed under creative commons, as those are the least restrictive types of licensing.

Free stock photos:

Editing and design tools:

Save Time by Extending On-Air Content to Your Site

Many of your visitors will be driven to your website by a piece of content or a promotion they heard on-air. It's important to make sure your on-air content is prominently featured on your station's website. To stay ahead of this, we recommend building a public calendar of your upcoming events, concerts, and contests.

Another way to extend your on-air content is to include on-demand snippets of your recent broadcasts. By hosting this on your site, you can use your on-air broadcast to tease interesting segments and drive visitors to your website for full-length versions. This will also give your audience the ability to browse their favorite segments or discover past interviews.

There are a number of tools that allow you to create on-demand content, but one feature that's important to keep in mind is performance metrics. By having access to performance metrics, you will be able to see exactly what's working, and what's not.

Don't Underestimate the Power of Syndication

If you manage multiple websites, syndication is a great way to save time and effort while increasing the content across all of your sites. One way to manage syndication is to categorize your content by format, region, and audience. For example, if you have multiple adult contemporary sites, you can share content about relevant artists or concerts. If you have a cluster of regional sites, you can share local news or events, and so on.

If you are interested in learning more tips and techniques to help optimize your station's online content, you can watch a quick 30-minute webinar on the topic, available here!