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High school and college graduations in most communities have come and gone.
Has the page traffic opportunity come and gone, too?
Yes. Well, that's if you're not organizing the content in smart and cool ways.
Earlier this week, in our Best of the Day blog we pointed out the great work done by the Patriot Ledger in organizing their graduation coverage.
The State Journal Register deserves similar kudos for their graduation page, which has many of the same elements that the Ledger's has, including a list of feature stories the paper has written about grads, recent photo galleries and a callout asking readers to send in their graduation content.
This isn't the first time Springfield has built a topical page and used a reader callout to anchor the page. It's a really smart move, especially for this topic. Readers who find their graduation special section online are likely interested in flipping through the pictures of their friends and family and probably took photos themselves at ceremonies or at least know people who did. The callout is hitting the right audience, an audience that most likely has content the newspaper wants.
While you might think that graduations are old news, if there in fact aren't any more in your community, you have to consider the casual reader who likes to browse on your website. Maybe they read one of your graduation profiles or saw a gallery for a school they care about, a week or so ago. But they haven't seen all of your coverage or weren't online when that coverage was featured prominently on your homepage. This kind of page is the perfect tool to engage them. It hits the casual web browser who may have an interest in this topic or the reader who has missed some of your coverage. And in the end, it drives at more time on site, something that's becoming increasingly important in the analytics world.
If you have graduation content from more than one or two ceremonies, this kind of presentation could be really helpful for your readers and your traffic.
Check out story ideas, interesting ways to use Web tools and any way journalists are reaching out to readers.
