How To Keep Visitors On Your Site Longer and Bring Them Back Again and Again

By Chris Small
Posted Friday, December 3, 2004

You work very hard to bring traffic to your site. When they finally do get there what happens? Well in a lot of cases they.... leave. Yup, they simply move on to the next site. That click happy mouse hand just doesn't like to stay put for long.

What’s a poor webmaster to do?

Following are five suggestions that will keep the mouse clicks within your site.

COPY

The first area to look at is your copy. What are the first 30 to 50 words that a visitor reads (if they read it at all). Is it compelling? Does it tickle the readers fancy enough for them to keep exploring?

You need to learn and apply the art of copy writing. If you can not write an effective presentation for your site you really should consider hiring someone who can. After all, what’s the point of doing all the marketing only to lose them on the first paragraph.

DESIGN

Yes, we've all read that you can have a terrible looking site but still make money with effective copy. While there may be some truth to that, it is certainly no excuse to get sloppy in the design and presentation of your site.

When meeting new people you always want to look your best. Likewise on the web, that first impression is extremely important. This static collection of pixels on the monitor is all that they have to go by. Make it a good one.

I am competent enough at using html and software programs to build ‘a decent web site’. But, my objective is not ‘a decent web site’. It is to have a GREAT web site. So I have chosen to work with one of the best designers on the Internet. If you are serious about presenting the best possible site to the world then I encourage you to find a skilled, artistic designer too.

CONTENT

How can you discover what it is that your visitors are truly looking for?

For starters, do a reverse search at the Search Engines. Some of the bigger Search Engines like Excite have a search voyeur (http://www.excite.com/voyeur_xt) that shows you the actual words and phrases that are being used at that moment.

Visit the busiest sites that are in your industry. Look at what they are offering and how it is presented.

Conduct an in-house survey. Ask your visitors and newsletter readers what they are looking for. You'll see a much better response rate if you offer some type of incentive for them taking the time and effort to fill out your form or questionnaire.

One more thing... Keep It Fresh! Constantly update the information on your site. Let your visitors know this too. They will want to bookmark your pages if they understand that next week there will be even more of what they are looking for.

FREE RESOURCES

Give something of value to your visitors. Ideally, you should strive to offer something that is unique and of great interest to your target audience.

Following are some of the methods that we have recently employed and found to be exceptional at keeping traffic on our site longer and bringing them back again and again.

Free Internet Marketing “How To” Reports, Free Audio Training Reports, Entertaining (but fast loading) FLASH Video, Links to other Resources, Newsletter/Ezine,
A Book Store,
Free Advice,
A Chat Room with Voice capabilities, Free Classified Ads.
Internal Banner Exchanger

Some of these features work so well that other webmasters are emailing to ask if they can offer links directly to them. Many other sites have voluntarily republished many of our original reports too.

EMAIL CONTACT

In every email communication that you send out you should be promoting your site. After you sign your name make sure to add a hot link to your site. A short ad or signature file is also quite acceptable in most messages.

Even though we just mentioned newsletters and ezines, they merit special mention. Currently there is no better way to bring large amounts of previous visitors back to your site than to stay in touch with them via email.

Encourage all your visitors to sign up for your newsletter so that you can remind them of the features of your web pages. Of course you will have to provide quality content in your Ezine as well.

There are many other methods to keep your visitors clicking back to you. But with these five suggestions you should be well equipped to receive that much sought after ‘repeat traffic’.

About the Author
Chris Small is a cyber entrepreneur and host of the very successful 'World Deal Center'. His main website is (http://www.WorldDealCenter.com/) You are invited to sample some of Chris's other articles by going to
(http://www.worlddealcenter.com/reports.htm).