Giving your Website Stickiness
Owning your own website means and includes ensuring that you attract maximum visitors to your site. The more people that visit your website, the more visible you are. However, it is important to ensure that not all visitors are first timers and that there are also returning visitors. Simple ways to ensure that your visitors return is by ensuring that your website is "sticky". Following are some simple ways to enhance the stickiness of your website:
User Friendly Design: If you want your website to become a favorite with your target audience, it is important to create a website design that is extremely easy to navigate. User friendliness of a website is an important consideration for most returning visitors. So, make sure that you design a website that is easily comprehensible to any first time visitor.
Content: Attractiveness of a website has always depended majorly on the content of the website. To say that content is king is to reiterate a known principle in online business. However, in order to get returning visitors, sticky content is essential. Sticky content is that content which is informative, useful and most importantly - freely available. If you want to ensure returning visitors to your website, make sure that you keep updating your website with content that is either educational or timely or merely informational.
Updates About Company: Another great way to manipulate content to suit your needs is to ensure that you provide information regarding all the latest happenings and activities in your business or company. This could also include information about the happenings in your industry or with respect to your target audience. However, it is important to ensure that the content attracts the reader and makes them come back for more.
Industry Related Widgets or Freebies: Most websites opt for putting up industry related widgets etc to attract visitors. Depending on your industry, you could opt for appropriate widgets that will allow the visitor to be well informed with respect to industry news. RSS news feeds with respect to the industry are another great way of attracting visitors and ensuring that they return. Alternatively, you could offer various products or services, related to your industry as freebies.
Publications, Excerpts and Interviews: You could distribute publications regarding your company in particular or industry in general free of cost. Publications related to your field in general, especially when they are educational, are often great ways of attracting returning visitors. These could also include excerpts of books published as well as interviews of experts, company executives as well as patrons.
Social Networking: A great way to ensure maximum returning traffic to your website is by marketing your website through the various social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon etc. However, it is important to ensure that you share the latest and updated news with your patrons through this media and link it to your site, which will ensure increased interest in your website.
Networking and Interaction: A golden rule for ensuring maximum returning traffic is by improving communication with your target audience. Community networking, social interaction, forum discussions etc are simple ways of ensuring that communication channels are open and used to their optimum. This could take the form of blogs or polls or even Q & A sessions, depending on your area of business and your target audience. However, it is important to get your target audience to interact with you and post on your site in order to ensure that they return. These could also include creating special games or quizzes to ensure maximum participation.
Offer Customizable Pages: Like iGoogle, Yahoo landing etc, if you offer your visitors the chance of customizing their pages on your website, chances of their returning increase. Not only does it allow them to release their creativity but makes the entire process of creation a lot of fun.
The above steps are some of the simple ways in which you can ensure that visitors return to your website.