VijanaFM is a very young blog and is constantly competing for eyeballs among the plethora of content that is available online. That being said, the VijanaFM team is actively working to increase its web presence and gather sustained web traffic from its primary audience group, East Africans.
#1: Content is King Blogs are about content. The more original, interesting and relevant content that is posted the greater our our traffic. VijanaFM has therefore increased the number of voluntary contributors to its site in order to maintain a steady flow of new content. The VijanaFM team is also very diverse in their experiences which leads to diverse content, again, a plus! We also realized that we need a good balance of Swahili and English content in order to gain greater acceptance among locals in East Africa.
#2: Make it easy From a usability perspective, we’re also trying to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. We’re maintaining a consistent tagging mechanism for all our posts and removing any overlapping and unnecessarily tags. We’re also working on categorizing by the three content types (audio, visual, text) that our platform seeks to promote.
#3: Just Google it We all know Google is the top search engine so how we rank on the search engine is a key priority. Now Google automatically increases your rankings as you have more visitors to the site which #1 and #2 are also helping to do. Each of our postings is also disseminated through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, this increases the number of ‘backlinks'(other websites that link back to yours) and thus increasing your rankings. Lastly, we’re also monitoring the portion of our web traffic that comes from organic Google searches and optimizing our site for the most actively used keywords for our target demographic.
Do you have any experiences of your own with building a sustainable web presence? Any strategies that worked for you? Please comment.
Taha is a technology enthusiast with a particular passion for mobile services. He loves following major technology/business trends in developing countries, especially his native Tanzania, and believes Africa is the new uncharted frontier. His entrepreneurial adventures have focused on CampuSMS – a texting service for college campuses. Taha is currently employed as a technology consultant with Capgemini in Los Angeles, California. He is also an avid traveler and photographer.