Five Tips to Attract and Keep More Visitors
Tip 1. Tell-a-Friend
Put a tell a friend form on your site. This is basically a box where your visitors can enter the name and an email address of a friend that might be interested in your site. Don’t use this technique to collect e-mail addresses for your list. Those belong to people who did not decide to receive email from you. In fact, make it clear in the mail you send that this is a one time mail only.
Tip 2. Make a Custom 404 Page
An ever changing website will often have pages that disappear after a while, because you don’t need them anymore or because you moved them somewhere else. Visitors that come to those pages will see an ugly 404 error message. Besides the fact that this looks bad to your existing visitors, it will also make sure new visitors will not get to see your site. Create a custom 404 page that tells your visitors the requested page does not exist anymore and offer links to the main parts of your site instead. Chances are new visitors will click on it instead of on their back button.
Tip 3. Use a Memorable Domain Name
If people didn’t bother to bookmark your site last time, but in time they remember they saw good information on your site, a good domain name might be all that’s needed to get them back. There are no rules to what constitutes a good domain name, but generally: shorter is better. You can check whether names have already been registered at Internic. Many hosting providers also offer this service. If all names seem to be taken, it’s time to get creative (Google anyone?), but try to come up with a relevant name first.
Tip 4. Give Away Free Products
Creating free products can work extremely well. If you create a product with giveaway rights, other people will pick it up and put it on their sites as well. They will do this because they they want to keep giving their visitors new things to keep them coming back. You win by placing a link in your product that will direct them to your site.
Some ideas of things you can create are an eBook, a software program you’ve written, an eCourse or a short tutorial, a video tutorial, website templates or some music you’ve made. People love to get free stuff. Be creative. Sometimes it can be appropriate to request something simple in exchange for your products. For example, ask visitors to send your site to two friends before allowing them to download your eBook.
Tip 5. Do Offline Promotion
With all the online things going on, don’t forget about offline promotions you can do. This is especially important if you have a local website. There are a great many things you can do offline, but for now we’ll stick to the cheaper ones. Make your url stand out as much as possible. If it’s not clear from your domain name what your site is about, try to add some ‘about’ information as well. You can create business cards, hand them out to everybody. Go to events and seminairs and exchange cards. These places are also good for networking. Maybe you’ll meet somebody who has the means to give your site more exposure.
You could make stickers (don’t forget to put one on the bumper of your car), make flyers or do something controversial or very original. There’s a story about a man who created a lot of footprints with his url on it, going all across town leading up to his house. This made the news and got him a lot of exposure. He also had to remove the footsteps, so think things trough a little before you jump to action.
