Keep Visitors Coming Back
Now that you’ve got the visitors coming in, you want them to like your site and come back often. In lesson 1 you learned how to get visitors that are interested in your topic, so it shouldn’t be too hard, but still… There are a few things you should and should not do keep your visitors happy.
Create Fresh Content Often
People will only keep coming back if they find something new everytime they get there. Take a look at just about any site you visit often, why do you go back there? Now you know… And as long as you’re creating new content often, see if you can add an RSS feed. If you’ve never heard about RSS before: it is a document that basically contains some info about the latest new items on your site. Whenever you add something to your site, you also change this document. People can then add your feed to their favorite RSS reader. This can be a program you install on your computer or a website such as Netvibes or iGoogle. It’s beyond the scope of this eCourse to teach how to create your own RSS feed, but most popular blogging software has this feature build in.
A mailing list
Another way of getting people back to your site is to start a mailing list. You can start a newsletter that periodically tells your visitors what has happened in your area of expertise during the last week or month of whatever period you decide to mail them. You can give people the complete information, or just some information and a few teasers about what’s new on your website. Don’t forget to include links to your site. You can start a mailing list by creating an optin box on your site. Many hosting sites support mailing lists, and you can use them. However, sending bulk mail can be seen as spam by some ISP’s, especially when you send it often. The mails you send out can reach less than 50% of the people on your list. So sometimes it’s better to use a commercial autoresponder service. Your mailings will then be send from another company, using your credentials. Those companies work hard to make sure that your mail will be received by as many people as possible. They also take care of people subscribing and unsubscribing.
Easy Navigation
When people come to your site, but can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave. People surfing the web have a notoriously little patience. So make everything on your site easy to find. In fact, if it takes more than two clicks for a visitor to reach what she or he is looking for, it’s too many. If you have a really big site, it can be 3 clicks.
You can also consider putting a search box on your site. Create one yourself or use one of the search engines. This will save you a lot of work, but it might be harder to show the search results as if they are a part of your site.
Make it Easy to Bookmark
Not everybody likes to do this, but you can add some ‘Bookmark this site’ buttons to your pages. You can also add links that will add your site or blog post to social bookmarking sites.
The Number 1 Rule!
The number one rule of any successful website is to create valuable content. Remember that people will only come back when they liked what they found last time. This is more important than anything else. Other website owners will only take the trouble to link to you if you offer something worth seeing, reading or doing. Visitors will come back only for that reason. Only if you provide value, you can try to extract some value in return. This can be in the form of more visitors, more income from your site, building a good reputation or whatever your goal is for the site.
I can’t stress this enough: remember that content is king! Whether this is in the form of text (blog posts, reviews, news, articles, etc.), artwork, a service such as Google, Digg or Netvibes, or whatever form of content you can think of. If it’s something of value, people will like it and come back.
