What you told us about your plans for the year, Part I

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is part of a continuing series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he shares your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

We’ve previously shared with you what you told us about optimization and how you display ads on your site. For 2007, we wanted to know what you’re planning to do as publishers. And in January, we asked you about your top priorities as publishers. You are obviously passionate about this topic, as the quantity of responses made this our most popular poll to-date. 
Here’s what you told us:

For your published site(s), what is your top priority for 2007?

Almost 60 percent of you told us that you were focused on driving traffic.  But you also had other ideas that you told us about including:

“Increase revenue from advertising.”
“Diversify.”
“Re-design.”
“Create more relative content with better targeted advertising and increase site traffic.”

Largely, most of you want to expand your operations, some through increased visitor traffic, others through expanded content or new sites.  Both methods could provide additional opportunities to display contextual advertising. 

Recognizing your focus on driving traffic, Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, notes there are many ways to help drive traffic that won’t necessarily require additional expense.  For example, suggest your sites to search engines, or consider an RSS feed to distribute your content.  Or, as some of you plan on doing, expand your content.

Forrester Research agrees with Margaret.  According to Forrester, the top five ways users find websites suggest that publishers don’t necessarily need to spend extra dough:

“How have you typically found Web sites that you have visited in the past month?”

Respondents were able to check more than one answer. Source: Forrester Research, “How Consumers Find Websites in 2006,” 10/06

For publishers who are interested in paid advertising, advertising in search engine results pages, like Yahoo’s,  may be a good place to start; sponsored search targets by keyword, and search engine results pages are often considered some of the “lowest-hanging fruit” for driving traffic.

Since we saw such a large percentage of you are intent on increasing site traffic, our next question was specifically about how you’re planning on doing that.  We will cover this in next installment.

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager