How to hold on to your web visitors

If you Google for ‘website’ and ‘traffic’ you’ll be inundated with miracle cures to increase visitors to your site. It will then take you roughly three days to sort out the ‘useful’ material.

But there are several ways to increase the number of visitors to your site, although that’s only half the battle. The real skill is being able to keep visitors coming back.

If you think this is a job for the tech-guys in your company, then think again. Getting web visitors to come back to your intranet site is just as important as your external internet, if not more so. Your department’s intranet is a key medium for communicating to your staff and it should be the first place they visit when looking for resources and information about your company and the products and services it offers.

I’ve set up blogs for heads of departments, created a presentation and sales aid library for pharmaceutical personnel, developed an interactive online training course and even created a photo gallery for a staff party. Here’s what I’ve learned and some of the services your website can provide:

• Presentations or videos of new products or initiatives
• Newsletters and articles
• RSS feeds or blogs
• A calendar of upcoming events
• Daily weather reports and stock quotes
• Feedback mechanisms – forms, forums and debating facilities
• Podcasts for iPods, PDAs or Blackberrys
• Thoughts for the day and favourite quotes
• Free fun stuff such as competitions, postcards, video clips and games

If you would like any more information, advice or to talk about how we can develop your intranet site to gain maximum exposure feel free to drop me an email at duncan.dibble@rxcomms.com.

Why they rejected your manuscript – and what you can do about it

Journal editors reject submitted manuscripts because they are:

• Inappropriate for their audience
• Poorly designed studies
• Poorly written
• Seen to have been submitted elsewhere
• Suspected of conflict of interest

When your manuscript is rejected, there are ways to handle the issue… principally by not taking rejection personally. There may be factors well beyond your control. For instance, the British publication, New Statesman , ran a competition whose first prize would go to the entrant who could produce a piece of writing that most closely resembled the style of acclaimed author, Graham Greene. Greene entered the competition – and came second!

A second way of handling rejection is by not attacking the editor. Editors are kindly and sensitive folk (I know it) and are just doing their job. Be ready to accept their constructive feedback. This you can do in a civilized way by addressing each suggestion for revision, by following instructions… and by being scrupulously objective.

As Dr. Edward Huth puts it in his excellent ‘How to write and publish papers in the medical sciences:’ Rejection may be fully justified from the editor’s point of view. Keep in mind how authors are competing for limited space in journals.”

But Huth, a former editor of Annals of Internal Medicine does offer a Plan B of sorts for the rejectee: Send the manuscript somewhere else. “The paper may be readily accepted by a journal of lesser reputation,” he suggests. “But before you send the paper to a new journal,” he advises, “do what you can to improve the odds that it will be accepted.” That means giving careful consideration to the reasons why the first journal gave you the thumbs down.

Don’t let rejection get you down. There are scores of examples of ultimately hugely successful works that were turned down multiple times. And remember the five Ps of effective writing: Passion, Patience, Perseverance, Pachydermia, and Parsimony. More on these in future issues of HOC .

This is one topic in David Woods’s talk ‘Getting Published’ which includes segments on overcoming writer’s block; a handy checklist for writers of nonfiction; the classical article format; how to produce editorials, reviews, and abstracts; plagiarism, conflicts of interest; copyright – and those five Ps of effective writing.