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Get a Website For Your Radio Club

Here's an idea for Ham Radio and even CB Radio clubs: Ditch your Facebook page and conduct club business on a website. Here's how I would do it.

If you still need to do so, get a stand-alone website for your radio club. It can be a simple static site like mine or a database-driven Content Management System like WordPress. Websites are cheap these days.

Write something related to Hobby Radio and your club every day. A simple paragraph will do. More is better, but a paragraph is fine if you make it a daily or almost daily event. Each member should be required to contribute a paragraph or two each month detailing their Hobby Radio activities.

If you do this, before long, you'll have a website loaded with Hobby Radio information (and valuable "keywords") that your members can benefit from, and your club can cash in on it by adding contextual advertising to the website. I'm talking about Google Adsense, Amazon, or another affiliate program such as Shareasale. Why not? You've been donating that valuable content (keywords) to Facebook, where the ownership gets richer from every word you donate. Keep that cash in your club and pay your members dividends instead of dues.

Resist the temptation to do these two things found on almost every Hobby Radio website: (1.) create a links page, and (2.) post links anywhere on your website to your social media sites. Why? Your job as a webmaster is to get people to visit your website and keep them there. You want visitors to read your content and click on your advertising. A visitor to your website leaving for (whatever sites you link to) is of no value to you or your club.

Now, on to social media. It is the job of social media to get people to your website. It is not the job of your website to get people to your social media account. You should be helping your cause, not Mark Zuckerberg's cause. If someone is at your website, keep them there unless you're sending them to a site that pays your club to do so. Many people feel that the purpose of a club website is to serve the membership. There's nothing wrong with that view. Posting dozens of links to other websites (doing their marketing work for them) doesn't have to be one of your services. Do your members want links or dividends?