Radio Sales Café

Happy Friday, everyone!

This week's multi-part poll question was posed by David G. Stern of Iola, KS:

David writes, "Our station has a very basic level internet page. We live stream our FM Station (except for High School Sports where we switch to our AM). Beyond posting school closings, pet of the week and some breaking news, I don't think we are taking advantage of the power it can offer. I know staffing, dollars, etc. are part of the issue. But I want to be able to add digital things to my selling kit. Even things as simple as banner ads for my clients that would link to their web pages."

Is there a good resource to learn how to develop a website and make it a place that people will want to go?

Is visual streaming something really sellable?

Can we learn to afford to do things to make it vibrant and a place people will want to often return? 

Lastly, what kind of budget both dollars and people does it take to really make it work?

Looking forward to reading your replies!

Most radio websites are not that good, just a virtual rambling of things. The site needs to be interactive, that is the key for radio in the future, be part of the experience.  A lot of folks say and will give advice on websites, look for someone who understands the marketing, not just content and graphics

streaming is sellable, but it must be bundled and it must bring in added dollars, do not just shuffle income numbers from one line to another, and that is the way most broadcasters relate their success

loads of things that can make folks return, do your homework on successful stations

budget is irrelevant if it is not successful, not done right, look for what it will take to make it work, then assign $ that it will take, a lot of time, it can be done by existing staff just doing it differently

Here's the advice I can offer, having developed and run our website for over a dozen years now.  (All coded by hand, by me ... because our site pre-dates things like WordPress.  Heck, when I started it, you couldn't easily find a host with database support - it was all text files!)  We average over 3 million page views and serve up over 450GB of data per month.  Traffic roughly doubling every two years now.

1. It won't become an astronomical success overnight.  It takes time to build it, and time to promote it, and time to get people visiting.
2. Give people a reason to come back!!  Most radio websites quite frankly SUCK.  It's all about the station, the promos, the announcers, and pictures of how great we are.  Yippy skippy.  One visit and I've seen all I need to see.  Make the site about the community(ies) you serve.  Keep it local.  Don't pull in national feeds of ANYTHING.  They can get that stuff at any number of bigger, fancier, more official sites.
3. Use your biggest promotional vehicle - your station - to promote it!  It costs you nothing to put some promos on your own station to drive people to the website.  Have your announcers talk it up.  We end EVERY weather break and newscast with our website.
4. Make sure EVERY staff member has the ability to add/remove/edit content on the site.  Make it part of their regular duties.  Community calendars, cancellation notices, high school sports scores, whatever.  If everyone does a little bit, nobody becomes over burdened with the responsibility - and if someone is away, someone else can easily pick up the slack. Seamless.
5. See #2.

The best resource out there is other radio websites.  Visit a bunch of them.  See which ones you like, which ones draw you in, which ones you hate, which ones you never want/need to visit again ... and take notes on WHY.  When we were getting ready to start, I spent a couple of months doing this.  Unless you have someone on staff who's a solid programmer/coder, your easiest starting point would probably be a WordPress installation on your server, and pay one of the MANY solid theme developers out there a few hundred dollars to create a custom theme for your station.  Money well spent if nobody on staff is comfortable with the whole thing.  

What do you want to visual stream?  The announcer in the studio?  Wasted resources.  Who REALLY wants to watch your announcers shuffle papers and check your Facebook feed while the music is spinning?  Audio streaming is sellable.  Our stream has a sponsored 10-15 second opening, then our live audio.  We don't use any ad splitting, just our regular broadcast ads go on the stream.

Budget wise, our annual hosting costs are currently under $400.  Yes, per YEAR.  The people it takes to make it happen are already in your building.  Should be very little if any additional costs, to be honest.

Our largest traffic and revenue generator is our free classified ads.  Depending on your market though, something like Kijiijii may have you beat - unless you promote it on air.  Have announcers pick a couple of interesting ads per shift and give them a mention on the air.  But DON'T give the contact info - drive them to the website to see it.  Stuff like that works.  More local content, people hear the added promotion a Kijiijii ad won't give them.

We've developed a product that has greater reach than our broadcast signal, and a very loyal (about 87% month after month return visitor rate) user base.  And it just keeps growing.  To the point where we are going to be moving to a larger server in the coming months to prepare for our next anticipated growth spurt.

(I've intentionally left our URL out of this post so as not to shamelessly self promote in the course of giving advice.)

Our site is www.ckdr.net.  

Small town station (about 8,000 in Dryden, ON), but we also have towers in four other (even smaller) communties.  Our signals combined probably reach just over 50,000. 

We have  knock out web pages...one for our FM, one for our AM and one for our Cable TV access station.   Have a look  star1025fm.com    wioz.com  and sandhillstv3.com..  Contact our web genius at [email protected] you have questions.    He's in house and digital is all he does.  We sell the heck out of it.  We used to do an annual off site Health Fair but the doctors offices and other participants had a hard time working it on a Saturday...no staff or had to pay staff overtime to man their booth.  Now it's all on line.  Last year we sold 21 virtual booths" at $600.00 each,  It stays online for 30 days and we use our radio stations to drive our listeners to look at each "booth".  Had over 30,000 visits to the site with each "booth" averaging about 6,000 views!  I do suggest you contact our web guy, Scott Murphy, with any questions.  He was on air for years so I know that helps him create better content. 

hi Jan,

FYI: I tried visiting your site(s) but, my virus protection software wouldn't allow me load your "home" page. It listed specific threats. I'm using avast. Joe