How can we engender a spirit of community and co-operation amongst businesses and residents in Ilkeston? How can we support our town and push for positive change?
The Ilkeston community would like to see a train station to improve the economy and provide better transport for local people. This website serves as an information resource and attempts to pull together news, views, developments and documents relating not only to our bid for a new train station, but the wider area and economic growth.
You can catch up with what’s happening and join the discussions over at the Facebook community and the Twitter profile.
Getting in contact with local businesses and councillors has been a positive experience and most people we have communicated with are interested in contributing articles, documents, images and video if they haven’t already done so.
The Ilkeston Advertiser is pushing the “Back on Track” campaign for which there was a very positive response.
Thousands of signatures were collected and submitted to the Department for Transport by Erewash MP Jessica Lee and Ilkeston Advertiser editor Peter Hemmett. However, this issue must remain in the spotlight if any progress is to be made.
Ilkeston want what other towns and cities take for granted daily; a means by which to travel outside of the borough relatively cheaply and quickly.
This will take pressure off congested bus routes, and even save on taxi fares for those on low incomes. Young unemployed people are missing opportunities to travel further fields for jobs that are harder to get to.
For the promotion of the website, email campaigns are being drafted and circulated amongst the business and residential community of Ilkeston.
There are plenty of shops on our long suffering high street, each of whom no doubt would be pleased to continue to push the agenda of proper transport infrastructure and general improvement of the area. Organisations in Erewash might also link to the website.
If The Erewash Partnership could support us and link through to www.ilkestontrainstation.co.uk it would raise the profile of the campaign. 
Members of the local business community including but not limited to Ilkeston are welcome to contribute letters, articles, photographs and anything that would pique the interest of the readers.
More content means more pages, and more pages means a higher ranking in the Google search results. The search engines crawl the web looking for websites of authoratitive, original and interesting content that match certain keywords.
The keywords most often used for the search marketing of this website are “ilkeston”, “railway station”, “campaign”, “economy”, “transport”, “erewash” etc.
Ilkeston’s 38,000 + population stands to benefit from a future railway link in the town, so reaching those who are internet users is a priority.
If you would like to add your thoughts or views to the site, please get in touch at [email protected] or visit the contact page for other communication options.
You will be doing a great service to the community by helping make this website a useful information resource. Full credit and an attribution/backlink to your website will be gladly given.
Spreading the message through social networks
Social media is a vital part of any modern marketing strategy and we’re presently using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Pinterest to help promote our campaign.
By clicking these hyperlinks (unless you are reading a printed document) you will be taken through to the respective social networking profile.
Consider these platforms an extension of the Ilkeston Train Station website, all of which point back to the site where the interesting and valuable content is.
The advantage of social media is the viral functionality provided free of charge. If we can get more people to participate and create content themselves this will give a feeling of involvement from the bottom up instead of waiting to be told from the top down.