As the proud publisher of a website I’m sure you have spent a considerable
amount of time and effort to attract traffic to your site. It’s not difficult to
realize how it is to your advantage to get repeat visitors to your website, rather than
to constantly be relying on finding someone new. A visitor who has previously viewed your
website offerings is much more likely to become your customer than a first time visitor.
To this end, I would like you to consider the following suggestions.
Update your website pages frequently. Stagnant sites are more likely to be dropped by
some search engines than a site that is dynamic. You may even think about placing a date
counter on the page to show when it was last updated. The search engines will spider your
site more often, and your visitors are more inclined to return on a regular basis to see
what’s new.
Offer additional value on your website. You can place links to affiliate and partner
sites and products and request that they do the same for you. It is also effective to
promote their books or videos as long as these products relate to your industry and are
not in competition with your own product. You can invite customers to opt in to get
discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to ask customers to opt in to get
a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
Place a Book Mark or Add This Site to Your Favorites link on your home page to
encourage visitors to return. Add a link titled Recommend this site to a Friend so that
the visitor can email your website link, with a pre-written title, for example, Thought
you might be interested in this, just by clicking on it. In other words, make it as easy
as possible for your visitors to return to your website and to invite their friends to do
the same.
Brand your website so that visitors can easily see that they are on your site. Use
consistent colors, logos and slogans throughout the site and always include a Contact Us
link on each page. Create a page titled Our Policies that clearly explains your
philosophy and principles in customer relations. Also post your privacy policy as well so
that clients know they are secure when they visit your site. Create a FAQ page which
addresses and clarifies the most likely issues about your product or your company that
are likely to be asked about. This will help to resolve most of the customers concerns in
their first visit to your site.
Ensure that each page on your website has proper titles and keywords so that your
customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark. Never, never,
NEVER! spam a visitor, who has opted in for newsletters or information, with unsolicited
emails. If they later decide that they want to opt out of your newsletter or other mail,
be sure you take them off the mailing list immediately. They may return if they like your
products. But they will surely not come back if you continue to flood their email box
with mails they consider junk mail or spam. Just remember to give your visitors plenty of
reasons to want to revisit your website, and make it as simple as you can for them. They
will be back.
By Paul Moore. By Paul Moore.
There are many websites starting up in business on the Internet every day. The more
websites, that get set up on the Web, the harder it becomes to get traffic to your site
as every site is competing with you to get as much traffic as they can. It also becomes
harder to get good rankings in the major search engines. So once you have your traffic,
how can you make sure that a good percentage of the traffic returns back to your site
time and time again?
Some of the things you could do to get returning visitors are shown as follows:
1. Make sure that your website gets new content displayed on it on a daily basis. This
gives a reason for your visitors to return to your site.
2. Making your site very entertaining is important. This can be done by adding sticky
content to your website, or a bit of humor here and there, just so that your visitor gets
entertained and it is then more likely to make your visitors want to come back to your
website. Although entertainment is good, it also needs to be updated on a daily basis.
For example, the games at: http://games.simplysearch4it.com is being updated on a daily basis.
This means that at least one new game is being added every day. This gives a reason for
the visitors to return to the site.
The more times your individual visitors return back to your site the more they will
start to get use to it and what it has to offer. This is very good. This will mean that
they will more likely get to know your brand and also your websites image. The more they
visit your site the more they most probably like it and the higher the chance of them
telling their friends.
3. Adding a forums or a place where people can hang out to your website is another
good way of giving people a reason to come back to your site. This is one of the reasons
why sites like MySpace and a lot of forums get returning visitors. This is because people
like to meet other people and have a place online to hang out and chat, plus share things
with new people and existing friends, plus they also like to learn new things.
4. Making your site so people can easily navigate it is very important. If your
visitors can easily find things on your site then they are more likely to return, as
people dont want to be searching for something on the Web for hours. They want to go to a
site and find what they are looking for in a few seconds. The quicker they can find
something on your site the better.
5. The speed that your site loads up to the visitor is very important. Visitors are on
the move all the time and dont want to wait for a site to load up if it takes rather
long. So the quicker you can make your sites pages load up, the more chance your visitor
will stay on your site and also return.
6. When designing your website, it is best to spend more time designing your websites
homepage to what it is with the other pages of your site. This is because your homepage
is where a lot of your visitors normally visit and is considered the most important page
of a website.
7. Giving your Website a good name is very important. If you give your site a name
that has nothing to do with your sites topic or is to long to remember, then there is
less of a chance that your site will get passed on through word of mouth and also, it
will be harder for people to remember your sites web address and will then result in less
returning visitors to your website.
8. Giving away freebies is not important, but can actually bring returning visitors to
your site. For example, if you offer game competitions on your website where your
visitors can win prizes, for playing your games, where they then compete with other
players, then there is more of a chance that a visitor will play your games, than what
they would with other gaming sites where they dont offer prizes to their visitors.
By
Jonathan White