Many voters now turn to the internet for their information. The following seven keys will help your website engage and win over those voters.

Key #1: People Don’t Care About You.

I know, I know, you’re running for office, but it’s still true. People care about themselves. They care about you to the degree that you can make their lives better and more enjoyable. And, most folks find bragging politicians disgusting. This is the hardest secret for many politicians to grasp. Most want their websites to be all about them.

The result?

Most political sites look pretty much the same. They all have the same pages: About, Issues, Contact, and Donate. They also don’t get much traffic. Even popular politicians miss out on their internet potential because they don’t know the secret that makes websites successful.

The secret? Provide value.

Your website has to help the visitor in some way. Answer the question “What is in this site for me?” for your visitors. Every candidate needs to face the reality that photos of your children or a video of your stump speech won’t keep anyone coming back. For anyone to visit your website, it has to be the most interesting thing on the entire Internet…  for that person at that time.

There are so many ways you can provide value. Here are some ideas:

• Talk about the issues and current events, not yourself. This is one of the best ways to gain trust and credibility.
• Post action items regarding current political situations.
• Post pictures or video of the staff behind the scenes who make it all happen
• Tell interesting stories from the trail
• Write articles and notes that they won’t see anywhere else
• Review books that have shaped who you are as a candidate
• Hold a Q&A. Let the readers leave questions in the comments, then record a video where you answer them.
• Give your readers a glance into your personal life. Did your daughter just have a baby? Post a picture, along with the name, weight, and time of birth. The ladies will want all the details.

Key #2: Be Remarkable.

Seth Godin has an interesting definition of “remarkable.” He says that for something to be remarkable, it must be worth making a remark about. Is your website remarkable? Do people start talking about it on Twitter and Facebook after they visit?

There are many ways to be remarkable and one good way to be unremarkable. To be unremarkable, all you need to do is be normal, fit in, and copy other websites.

To be remarkable, you need to be different, edgy, or unique. A website can be remarkably bad or remarkably annoying. You want your website to be remarkably helpful, funny, or insightful. How is your business remarkable? Expand on that for your website.

Remember Mike Huckabee’s Chuck Norris ad? It was so remarkable that it made the front page of YouTube. That happened because enough people loved, hated, or found it interesting and amusing enough to pass it on to their friends.

Key #3: Identify Your Target Audience.

Who is your website for? Many candidates fall short because their websites are a general web presence “to whom it may concern”. This thinking is a shortcut to obscurity. Successful candidate websites know who they are targeting and tailer their content accordingly. So, who are your readers?

Knowing who you are not targeting is the key to thrilling the people you actually want to reach. If you are running as a Republican, for instance, don’t try to target tree-huggers and gun-control activists. Remember, for anyone to visit your website, it must be the most relevant,  interesting thing on the entire Internet at that moment. You won’t become that interesting by trying to please a big group of people. But you can thrill a few.

Focus!

Statistics show that voters who are active, politically engaged, and influential in their circles will in turn bring in many other votes. Your job as a candidate is to find and target those people.

Key #4: Have a Mission for Your Website.

Most politicians really have no strategy for what they want their website to accomplish. They also have no idea if their current website is effective or not.

Successful websites have one clear goal. To help our clients pick a goal we ask them the following questions:

• What does the ideal visitor outcome look like?
• What do you want people to do after visiting your site?
• Why do you have a website? Guilt is a bad reason to start a website.
• What do you want your website to accomplish?

If the goal of your website is to:

• build your platform, then you had better have a very prominent subscribe form for people to get email updates.
• increase donations, then you had better have the “donate” button up front and center.
• register voters, then you had better have a button to a voter registration form in a prominent place..
• increase the number of visitors, then you had better have some remarkable content and some “share” buttons where people can easily share your site on Twitter and Facebook.
• connect with readers, then you had better have a way for people to leave comments.
• sell a book, then you had better have a big shiny “buy now” button somewhere on the homepage.

You can have secondary goals, but if you don’t know where you’re going you will never get there.

Key #5: Integrate Social Bookmarking and Social Media.

Okay, so now you have a remarkable website that provides value to a specific target of visitors you can thrill. Now you want to make it as easy as possible for them to share your website with one another.

The best way to do this is to integrate social media into your website. Buttons like “Share on Facebook” and “Share on Twitter” are key to growing your traffic. If your website is run on WordPress, there are some great plugins that will do this automatically. We use Sociable among other plugins for our clients.

Key #6: Integrate a Blog.

Websites with blogs built in get 55% more traffic than websites with no blog.

They get more traffic because blogs posts are more likely to be shared on social networks than static content. Blogs also boost your rankings on Google. Each blog post is a chance to get Google points to rank high in searches. Think of it as a lottery ticket. The more blog posts you write, the bigger chance you have of hitting it big.

You want your blog integrated into your website. This means the address is on yourdomain.com, not blogger.com or wordpress.com. Why?  When you blog on Blogger, you give all your Google points to Blogger and get nothing in return. As a candidate, your name recognition is very important. You want your Google points to go to YourName.com. Here at Webroots Media, we specialize in building websites with integrated blogs.

Key #7: Focus on Content Over Design.

A pitfall many candidates fall into is the tendency to focus on the design of their websites and neglect adding value to them.

When they get website, they know it needs to be sharp and professional. As long as it looks good and the donate button works, they feel they’ve fulfilled their obligation to the web and move on.

Most candidate websites look just fine. The problem is there is nothing to see.

Think of the design as a picture frame and the content (blog posts, articles, podcasts) as the picture. Our recommendation is to spend ten times more time and money creating a good picture (the content) rather than a good frame (the design).

Having at least one staffer assigned with helping you create value for your site is strongly recommended. This is not a substitute for your own involvement – your readers want to hear from you, not your staff – but it can be an invaluable timesaver to have someone to dictate to, snap pics and take video, and come up with more ideas for content.

More and more of the voting population is on the internet. It pays to investing your campaign resources accordingly.