Political Campaign Tips and Strategies by Online Candidate

Alternate Domain Names for Campaign Websites

Sometimes the original domain name of your campaign turns out to be the wrong choice. Though you had thoughtfully considered your original domain name, as the campaign moves ahead, you find that it just isn’t working out.

It might be because the name is too long or the candidate’s name is too hard to spell. A name that seemed good in the beginning is now causing complaints from supporters and potential voters who are having a tough time getting to the site.

For example, the political campaign website address of georgejonesfortinytowncouncil.com is, technically, a decent name. It incorporates the candidate name and the position sought. The problem is that the longer the domain name, the harder it is for someone to remember or accurately type into a web browser.

One way to solve the problem of having too complicated a political domain name is to simply get another domain name and redirect (or ‘park’) it to the original. For example, ‘votejones.com‘ could be pointed to the original ‘georgejonesfortinytowncouncil.com‘ site. The shorter name is a lot easier to incorporate into brochures and other print materials. By using a name redirect, you don’t actually need to set up a new website.

You may also want acquire and point a second domain name if the original is easily misspelled. Another instance may be where a campaign is not using another website or microsite anymore yet wants to redirect any residual traffic to their primary site.

On a technical note, this is called a 301 redirect, with ”301″ interpreted by search engines as “moved permanently”. It is not very hard to implement and it should preserve any existing search engine rankings.

We had this issue come up recently for one of our candidates. They thought they needed another website to go with the new name. We were able to get them set up with a second domain name pointing to the original site without a problem.

When to consider registering an alternate domain name:

When the candidate’s name has a common misspelling. If your name or organization is commonly misspelled, it’s a good idea to register that domain name and redirect it to your site. This makes things easier for users who may give up if they don’t reach your site on the first try. It also keeps competitors from snatching the name up and using it for other purposes.

For single and plural variants. If your domain name consists of a noun that has plural and singular forms, you may want to consider getting both names.

In the case of a nickname. If you have a nickname or if an opposing candidate nicknames you, consider purchasing that name defensively. It’s too easy for an opponent to create a website based on your nickname or point the domain to another location that you would not approve of.

For campaign print materials. If you happen to have a very long or difficult domain name, having a secondary name can help. A shorter name can also fit better on brochures, door hangers or campaign signs. Long names are fine when they are web links, but ‘smith4mayor.com’ is a lot easier to type into a web browser than ‘electsmithfortinytownmayor.com’.

When you are planning to use a .org or .net domain. These extensions are fine for organizations and are intended for that use. Even today, however, most people type in .com to the end of a domain they type. Because of that, it’s a good idea to also secure the .com domain in addition to the .org or .net domain name. When someone types in the .com version that you do not own, they will end up in an entirely different website! If you cannot secure the .com version of your name, you may want to try a different name altogether.

When your first choice doesn’t work out. Sometimes your first choice just doesn’t work out. Looking back, the name might have been too long or it no longer matches the position you are currently running for. If this happens, it’s not the end of the world. You can always switch your site to the new domain name, and use your old domain as your secondary domain. Done properly, ‘smith2020.com’ becomes ‘smith2024.com’ without skipping a beat!

With the arrival of new political TLDs like .REPUBLICAN and .DEMOCRAT, some candidates and organizations are using these vanity domains for their branding.

On a technical note, pointing multiple domain names to a single website needs to be done by whoever controls your web hosting. Parking domains or even converting domains from one name to another is not difficult, but if it is not done properly, it can affect your SEO and search engine rankings.

We provide free domain redirects for clients that use multiple domain names. If you want to see if a domain is available and register it for your use, simply go to our client portal. Domains can be registered with or without a campaign hosting package.

FREE DOWNLOAD: Political Domains and Hosting – What You Need To Know
Related: 5 Things To Know About Your Campaign’s Domain Name

Online Candidate® websites include an easy-to-use interface, custom design, and powerful tools to make building your online presence as quick and pain-free as possible. Start your online campaign with our affordable website packages.

What Is Your Campaign Website Missing? [Infographic]

Preparing for your campaign website or recently launched one? Make sure your site includes this simple but important information for voters.

You would not believe how many candidates fail to add the who, what, when and how of their elections. Then they wonder why they have problems getting their website to show up for searches.

What Is Your Campaign Website Missing Infograph

Feel free to republish this infograph on your own website. Click here to open the image in a new window.

For additional online tactics and strategies, visit OnlineCandidateResources.com. Site access is included with any of our website packages.

Best Practices When Linking to News Stories

Are you making the most of what is written about you or your political opponent? During a political campaign, there will be news coverage of the candidates. How you handle that coverage can help both your website visitors and your campaign’s search engine optimization.

Here are a few simple tips to promote online news stories and help build your online reputation at the same time.

Don’t just link to headlines when adding news items to your website. And whatever you do, don’t reproduce full article text without permission from the publisher. That’s plagiarism. And it can come back to bite you. Instead, summarize the article in a short paragraph or work it into other content. You can even editorialize to make it flow better or make a specific point.

“… the turnout at our fundraising event was a great success, even better than our first.”

We see a lot of our clients just copy and paste entire articles into blog posts. This is one of biggest mistakes they can make. Also, they may copy an article’s photo without permission or attribution.

Don’t just link to material that talks about you. Link to articles or editorials that are critical of your opponent. You can use them to reinforce your own positions.

“… as you can see from this article, [opponent] is still having problems with …”

In this case, linking out to third-party articles serves two purposes. First, it provides a point of reference that lets you back up your statements. Second, it allows you to promote positive information about for your campaign and promotes material that is not so good for your opponent. (After all, why would you promote positive things about your opponent? That’s their job.)

Tip: Don’t go crazy with too many links on your pages. This can overwhelm users and actually make it harder for them to find the information they need.

Not only should you link to articles from your campaign’s website, but you should also share those links on your social media accounts. Encourage your supporters to do the same.

The number of a web page has influences how likely that page will rank in related search results. Ideally, when a voter does a search for your name, not only will your campaign website come up, but also favorable articles that you have promoted should appear.

Conversely, by linking to and sharing content critical of your opponent, you can help that material show up when someone searches for your opponent. With a little work, this tactic can be very effective, especially with local campaigns that don’t have a large amount of online coverage.

For larger campaigns with more online material and coverage, it may be more difficult to push up or push down specific content. For those cases, you may want to reach out to online reputation specialists.

For more advanced online tactics and strategies, visit OnlineCandidateResources.com. Site access is included with any of our Online Candidate website packages.

Get Better Results With Targeted Landing Pages

A landing page on your campaign website is simply a page where visitors are redirected from a particular traffic source. This can include campaign emails, social media posts, PPC ads and so on. If you want to get more from your online promotional efforts, it is critical to have a good landing page strategy.

Landing pages have specific purposes. For example, one might be a signup page for a specific campaign event. Another might be donation page tied to a a particular email donation request. Whatever the purpose, every landing page should be designed for a specific purpose – that is, to convert its targeted traffic and cause visitors to take a particular action.

In other words, don’t send all your traffic to your site’s home page.

Another thing about custom landing pages is that they are typically not tied into the website’s navigation. They are designed to be ‘hidden’ from everyone except their intended audience. By creating specific landing pages, you can more easily track the success of a page by conversions (signups or donation through the page) or by analyzing its traffic through your website analytics.

Clients can easily create landing pages through their Online Candidate website administration. Here’s a step-by-step overview of how to do so:

Creating a landing page for your Online Candidate site

Hover your mouse over Tools and Widgets, then over Landing Pages, then select Create Landing Page
First, Determine the type of page this will be:
- How are you creating this page?
  - You Supply All HTML – Use this for pages that will entirely custom. You will provide all of the HTML, not just the content.
  - Templated Page – This will create a page with your existing site’s template. It’s similar to creating a regular site page.
Next, add the landing page information:
- New File Name: [Required Field] – 15 character maximum using letters and numbers only. The file name will appear in the web address. It should reflect the content of the page. For example: choosing the file name landing1 for the page will show as: www.YourDomain.com/landing.html
- Page Title: [Required Field] – This is used to name the file in the system.
- Page Description: Required only if this is a Templated Page.
- Keywords: Required only if this is a Templated Page.After you have filled in the information,
click ‘Create New Landing Page’.
Regenerate your site to make the changes live.

Edit a Landing Page

To view a preview of the page: Click on the links of the name of the page.
To delete a page: Click the delete button.
To edit a page: Select the radio button of landing page you wish to edit and click the ‘Edit this page’ button below.

Edit the page information and content as you want.
When you are finished, click “Edit Landing Page”
Regenerate your site to make the changes live.

From there, you can use the link to your landing page for your specific promotion!

Online Candidate clients have full access to our exclusive resources at OnlineCandidateResources.com. Learn more about our powerful website packages and see why so many candidates and campaigns have used our services for over 10 years!

5 Things Candidates Should Never Do Online

More and more politicians are finding themselves in hot water for things they say or do online. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a little knowledge, foresight and attention, any political candidate can create and maintain a positive online presence.

Because there are so many potential online pitfalls, let’s focus on the most common mistakes you can make online. These errors often reveal a lack of online savvy and can end up damaging your online reputation.

Assuming you have privacy

First and foremost, anything you ever say, post or share online (or offline) should pass the ‘New York Times Test’. That means, if you wouldn’t be comfortable with what you’ve said or done online appearing on the cover of the New York Times, then don’t do it.

Pretending to be someone else

This happens more frequently then you might think: A local candidate creates several profiles on a local newspaper discussion board and uses them to promote themselves or bash their opponents. If the candidate or supporter is outed for doing this, it just looks bad … and petty.

This kind of thing also happens when the opposition engages in political domain name squatting to create fake and misleading websites. This can come back to hurt you when the truth comes out.

Small aside: While working for a local newspaper, we once ran an online poll about an issue concerning a local politician. The trend that morning was against the mayor, but within a few hours the number of votes skyrocketed and the poll suddenly swung in the mayor’s favor. Suspecting that someone was engaging in multiple votes by deleting browser cookies, we took down the poll. Less than an later, I got a call from the mayor himself asking why the poll had disappeared. I told him that we suspected there was tampering, so it was easier to take down the poll than to go through the trouble to trace and block the people who were messing with the poll. He agreed and let the matter go. Makes you wonder why he was so concerned with an online poll…

Trying to delete material after the fact

It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup that gets politicians in trouble. This occurs often with Twitter or Facebook, though it can happen anywhere, even on a campaign website. In this case, a candidate or elected official makes a crude, rude or insensitive remark. Then they later delete the post and pretend nothing happened. Unfortunately, social media posts can rarely be fully ‘deleted’ and pretending they never existed in the first place is silly.

If you must delete a post, do it, publicly acknowledge that you have done so, and move on.

Letting your accounts die slow, meaningless deaths

If you start a social media account and promote it, you owe it to the people who follow you to keep your content fresh and up to date. People will either forget about you or wonder why they decided to follow you in the first place. Either way, it doesn’t leave a positive impression.

If you have a presence on a discussion board, website or social networking site and later find that you cannot maintain your updates, be sure to let your followers know that you are stopping your updates. If you are moving on, let them know where or how you will be providing future updates.

Spam out

Bombarding supporters (or worse, voters who are not actively following you) with large numbers automated or unwanted messages will only annoy them. This can get you a reputation as a political spammer. Yuck.

The biggest offenders are the campaigns who buy unfiltered email lists and send unsolicited messages. Even though political messages do not technically fall under the CAN-SPAM act and are technically legal – sending untargeted bulk messages is a spammy practice and generally unappreciated by the recipients. Growing your own email list is a much more effective way to build an audience.

Quality over quantity should be the hallmark of your posts, Tweets or email updates. Tools like Hootsuite allow you to automate posts so that they are spread out over time. However, preplanned posts tend to be one-way broadcasts. It takes a personal touch to get voters to know, like and trust a candidate. An endless stream of canned volunteer and donation requests just won’t cut it.

Online Candidate websites include an easy-to-use interface, custom design, and powerful tools to make building your online presence as quick and pain-free as possible. Check out our affordable website packages and get a jump on your opposition.

A Local Political Candidate Fail

Political candidates are often hurt by what they say or do on social media. A single Tweet can get a campaign in hot water. Sometimes, though, doing nothing can also become a problem.

As an example, we’d like to share a story about a campaign fail from a local candidate in our area. The name has been redacted to protect the guilty.

The election was a fairly high-profile race. The campaign had started its own Facebook page, promoted it and built a following of several hundred. and then let it wither and die. The first post was June 19th. The last post was on September 25th.

The election was in November.

So, what happened between the end of September and early November? Did the candidate drop out of the race?

No. She simply stopped posting. Nor was the website ever updated again.

There were no status updates in the weeks leading up to Election Day. There were no get out the vote reminders. Nothing. Social media posts just … stopped. After the election, the website remained unchanged. There was no follow-up message on the home page. No thank-you to supporters. Nothing.

Anyone following that campaign would have had no idea what was going on. Since no email updates were ever sent from the campaign, even die-hard supporters were left out of the loop.

To end the suspense, I’ll tell you that the candidate lost the election.

So, was a bad online campaign the cause of her loss? Probably not. She was running against a well-entrenched incumbent. Still, her poor performance online didn’t help.

There are a couple takeaways from this fail. First, don’t take on more social media than you can handle. If you don’t think you’ll be able to keep up with multiple platforms, then don’t start using them. If you commit to a platform, see it through. Don’t leave voters hanging midway through the campaign. It will look like you are either disorganized, not engaged, or perhaps dropped out of the race.

In the long-term, abandoning social media accounts may open them up to negative posts and comments that could remain indefinitely.

Keep your website up-to-date during and after the election. At the end of the campaign, before you shut everything down, you should at least acknowledge the results of the race and thank your supporters. They deserve it.

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