How to Prepare Your Website for a Major Publicity Event

Congratulations!  You’ve landed a major press opportunity that’s going to be giving your website a lot of new traffic (because you read our previous post The Art of the Pitch: How to Land Coverage on More Blogs, perhaps?).  But what do you do now?  How can you maximize the exposure you get in order to make sure you actually build your following or customer base instead of just getting a momentary spike in traffic and then going back to where you were before?

In order to get the greatest benefit of your upcoming exposure, take some time to prepare your website so that you’re ready to capitalize on the all of the new attention coming your way.

One great example is a blogger who writes a guest post on the blog of another, more-prominent blog.  If done right, your guest post should match the interests of the audience for the blog your writing for, but also be about topics you cover regularly on your own blog.  It should serve as a sample of the posts you write on your site, and entice readers of the host blog who are interested in your topic to visit your page.

In this situation, you can create a new blog post or section at the top of your site that is specifically for visitors coming in from the guest post.  Get their attention by saying something like “Readers coming from [HOST BLOG], if this is your first time here…” and then provide them with a call to action or next steps tailored to the kind of people who would be coming from that blog.

One great idea is to give them a list of other posts they might like based on the fact you know they read the blog where you made your guest post.  Also make sure that you have a way to turn these people from one-time visitors into regular readers by getting them to sign up for a mailing list, follow you on social media, or becoming a subscriber or customer of yours in some other way.

Regardless of whether you’re a blog or a product website or a B2B services site, in order to maximize the results from your upcoming press exposure, you’re looking to turn a one-time visitor into a long-term relationship.  A key aspect of this is finding a way to continue contacting these visitors after they’ve left the site to build that relationship.

For sales-based websites, having a capture form to collect leads is an excellent way to build your pipeline.  Giving visitors something away for free in exchange for the visitor filling out their information is a great way to increase the conversion rate of your lead-generation forms, too.  For more about leveraging free content and special offers to grow your business, you can read our post Qualifying and Capturing Leads with Free Content.

If your upcoming press exposure is going to be directing visitors to a sales page to try and get them to purchase immediately, without bothering to capture them as leads first, you can try creating a special version of your landing page just for this audience.  This will allow you to tweak it so that it can be targeted specifically to the demographics of the audience coming from the press opportunity.

For example, if your product is a time-management program, and you will be getting traffic from a website that tailors to C-level executives who have large salaries but equally large demands on their time, you could redesign your page so that it promotes your most expensive but also most effective courses.  For this audience, price is not as important as getting results.  Rather than show them all of your low-priced options, which are probably not for them, you can steer them towards the products that will be the best for them in terms of results, and also the best for you in terms of profit.

No matter what kind of site you run, if you’re going to be getting major exposure taking some time to prepare your site to capitalize on that opportunity is the best way to maximize your results.  Make sure that you have a way to turn these new visitors into long-term relationships, and it could help trigger tremendous growth for your business.

If you’ve had success preparing your website for significant press exposure, let us know in the comments what you did and what made it so successful!