Hopefully, you want to make money from your website; content is the key. Fresh content is one of the most crucial steps to a successful website. Content drives traffic to increase your SEO, which ensures more visitors see your content. More visitors equals more revenue once you sell website banner ads and sponsorships.
Many people-strapped radio stations find it challenging to add fresh content, so they turn to RSS feeds. We will always discourage displaying RSS feeds, as they do nothing more than send visitors away from your website. When visitors leave quickly, your SEO scores drastically decrease.
The alternative to displaying RSS feeds is importing them so the visitor stays on your website. You cannot just pick any RSS feed and import the content on your website. Doing that has several copyright issues, the most prevalent being image copyright. We’ve known sites to have permission to import specific RSS feeds. When the feed included a copyrighted image that was only allowed for their website, the radio station received a several thousand-dollar bill from the image police for the image appearing on theirs.
You can import news from several legitimate news services, including barter digital news from ABC News and “Boomsite.fm” from United Stations. One of our affiliates turned us on to a new service that offers national and state news that you can import – and it’s free.
Jerry Lyles is the VP of syndication and distribution for Franklin News. We’re looking at their The Center Square news service. Several of our affiliates are already importing their news content.
The Center Square can be a great news resource for your radio station. We do not recommend importing RSS news only – or filling your website with news from every state. Importing too much news that is not relevant to your audience can hurt your website’s SEO.
For the best results, only import additional content to supplement the local news and other content you create. Check your Analytics to see if visitors are consuming that content. If most do not visit those news stories, stop importing them and put a more significant focus on what they are consuming.
We want to help your radio station grow and succeed online. That journey starts with an amazing website that keeps visitors coming back often. Reach out to us to start your path to online success, or schedule an appointment to see our tools in action.