Keep visitors loyal - dish up the news

In the past, the question was whether or not a celebrity had an official site or a fan site.

These days the net has gotten a lot more complicated. The big questions are:

1) Can you find the official site in the search engines?
2) Will the fans stick around after they've found the site?

A nice design will impress then and there, but to keep the fans tuning in whenever the celebrity has something to promote, he has to make it easy for the fans.

Introducting: RSS feeds

Regular female fans are often technologically unsophisticated, and most will just go "RSS who?". But it will catch on, mark my words.

In the past a well run official site either had a newsletter or a forum, or sometimes both. I've always advocated the newsletter as the best way to make sure the fans stick around. It's still a great service to offer. But some more advanced users will avoid newsletters if at all possible (inboxes get more and more clogged with spam, and they want to avoid mail except for personal use), and opt for RSS feeds instead. They read a lot of blogs and news sources, and using an RSS reader will allow them to keep up on what they're interested in. No need to visit lots of sites to keep up on things. Just pop in if there's something new to report that merits more in depth reading.

So my advice right now is to offer an RSS feed if possible, but keep the newsletter.

If you have a Yahoo group with open message archives (can be viewed by anyone, member or not), there's an XML and a MyYahoo button on the home page for the group. Those are RSS feeds. The XML one is the one you'd use for all RSS/newsreaders except for MyYahoo. So a Yahoo group newsletter lets you do both at the same time.

Should you have a forum? That depends. If the celebrity is active enough so there's a lot to discuss, and has enough fans so a forum wouldn't look half empty, then it's a great thing to keep fans loyal. You'll also need staff - a moderator who has time to hang out and keep things in order. And an administrator who can fix the technical stuff as well as be a head moderator - taking the moderation decisions and laying down policy for the moderator(s). PhpBB is a good forum software, as long as you update it when a new version comes. Otherwise it'll be hacked sooner or later.

Some forums also allow you to make RSS feeds from some of the subforums. Some implementations are pretty crude, but it's possible.

Another option is to bake in a blog as part of the website. I recommend WordPress.

You should decide if you want to allow comments and trackbacks at the time of installation. If you don't want that, remove the functionality, and those scripts, otherwise you'll be found by spammers and have a hard time keeping the blog spam free. If you do want to allow comments, remember that it's a commitment: You need to install anti-spam plugins and remove spam that slips through. But a guestbook presents the same problem. Hmm, for a new guestbook, I have a suggestion: Install the script on the site itself, and don't allow search engine spiders to index the directory it's in. Read up on robots.txt. That should keep it almost spam free.

To the fans:

The easiest way to get a reader for the RSS feeds:

• Bloglines (recommended. You can also share your favorite feeds with others this way)
• My Yahoo - use the same Yahoo ID as with groups and mail.
• Newsreader programs. These install on your computer. Bloglines is much easier, but for geeks, a good program offers choices. Google it..

Some of my feeds:

• Forum
• Newsletter