Is Your Site Stale, Part III: Staying Persistent and Consistent

The hardest part of keeping a site fresh is setting aside the time to actually do it. At first, it seems like an exercise in futility. You may spend hours every week keeping your site fresh only to see your traffic go nowhere. It can be frustrating. However, keeping your site fresh isn’t an overnight project. It takes persistence and craftsmanship. We can even throw in the old “building a house” cliche. Laying the foundation is the hardest, most time consuming aspect of the process but once it’s done, you can build anything. In other words, you need to establish a foundation on which you can constantly update your web site quickly with useful information. What does this mean exactly? Let’s roll through a list of actions you must take.

1. Have a plan

Yes, everyone preaches having a plan. But this is important. You need to at least have a general idea in your head of what you want to accomplish with your web site. Do you want to be an information resource for confused prospects? Or, maybe you want to offer unbeatable customer support resources on your site. You might even want to do all these things (don’t get in over your head, though). Decide what it is you want your site to be good at. This will give you a concrete direction in what you’ll need to do to update your site on a consistent basis.

2. Figure out what’s important

Find out what your customers, prospects, partners, vendors and so forth find important. If you’re planning on creating an information resource for prospects, determine the kinds of things they’ll be looking for. For example, if you’re a plumbing company, perhaps prospects first want to know the signs of a potential leak. In that case, you could do something like posting a blog entry on the “Top 5 Signs You Have a Leak in Your House.”

3. Get the right tools

Don’t get held up with the technicalities of updating your web site, even if you’re a superstar programmer. These things just clog creativity, damper spirits and ultimately result in little getting done. Instead, find the tools you’ll need to update the necessary portions of your site from the beginning. Whether it’s a full blown content management system you need or something simpler like MyMediaRoom, or even an HTML editor like Adobe Dreamweaver, the tools are out there. Spend some time researching them and select the one that’ll get the job done fastest.

4. Set a schedule

Once you’ve got everything in place to keep your site smelling fresher than a rose on a warm spring day, set a schedule. Make it a goal to update your site twice a week, once a week, once everything two weeks or whatever works best for you. Consistency is key. You can’t skip a week or else you’ll skip the next one, and then the one after that. This is an exercise. It’s also a way of building your organization. You may cringe doing it at first but you just have to tough it up and keep at it. Once you find your groove, it’s smooth sailing.

5. Don’t check your traffic everyday

Monitoring your site traffic is important for diagnostics. However, checking your traffic stats everyday to see if new prospects are coming in is dangerous. It’s like going on a diet. You feel good that you ate less the first day so you want to rush to the bathroom scale to see how much weight you’ve lost. Here’s what you’re going to find. You didn’t lose any weight. Or, in the case of your web site, you probably didn’t gain any new traffic. It takes time and effort, and you may have to spend months working at it. But rest assured, if you keep your site fresh, and you do it well, your site will serve as an effective marketing channel.

This brings us to a close on our three part series on keeping your site fresh. Hopefully, you’ve learned some new and interesting things. Keep checking back – we’ve got more coming!