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One of the ways to make a site popular is to know your audience. News sites will only cover what they think is news. Even within the general category of news, there are more specific niches, for example Internet based news, or even regional news. The whole idea is to connect to your users at the most basic level. But how do you connect to multiple users from around the world on a basic level, a local or regional area? Max Mind’s GeoIP can assist with that.
If you are not fimilar with Max Mind or GeoIP, here is the basic idea. You have a database with a list of IP addresses, and you associate those IP addesses with a region. You could create this database yourself, but why reinvite the wheel? Max Mind has either a free or paid GeoIP solutions that you can use.
So how does GeoIP make your site more user friendly you ask? Well let’s say that you have a news site, and you have visitors from Japan, England, and Germany. With GeoIP, you can detect what nation that the user is from and direct them to a site which is translated into their native language. This will make the user more comfortable when visiting your site. You can determine where the user is located and give them stock market information for their nations, or recent headlines that directly effect their nations. Again, making your site feel more comfortable and directed to their market.
You can also use GeoIP for revenue purposes. Having the ablility to target a group of customers is important for advertisers. The better targeted you can create ads for income, the more you can charge. For example, if you can get a client who wants to target Japanese audience, and you can tell them that you have the ablililty to just target that region. They will not have to pay for all the Germans or British that connect to your site. With that in mind, your site looks more fruitful, even if you charge a few extra cents per ad. The advertisers don’t have to “waste” all the extra money by hoping that you have a given amount of users from Japan. Also, by knowing where your audience is located, this is more information that you can use when selling ads on your site.
GeoIP is a very useful tool, if implimented properly. Yes, that means that you will have to do some additional coding, but the cost to do those will be paid off. Connecting with your users on a regional, and/or local area will benefit your site way more, then having a pot luck of regional interest and ideas.
Topics: Database, Design, Programming
