Making your site "sticky" simply means creating a site that
keeps the visitor within the site as long as possible and
getting them to return often. Making YOUR site "sticky"
involves some extra work on your part, but drawing in
traffic and keeping it at your site IS your goal, right?
Here are a few things you can do to do just that:
Now that you've registered your site, you're almost
ready to start taking orders. Next, you need to accept
credit cards. Charge.Com lets you take MasterCard, Visa,
American Express, and Discover. They have the best rates,
over 95% of applicants are accepted, and there's NO
APPLICATION FEE.
Make sure your visitors know you're still alive! Update
monthly, weekly if possible, to keep the content fresh.
People want to see something new when they return to your
site. If you offer a service or sell a product, your
visitors will more likely turn into customers if they know
you're still active. You could add company news or site
updates to your main page.
=> OFFER FREE EMAIL
Even if you don't own a domain, you can still offer email
through several services. If you do own a domain, even
better! Whenever the person wants to check their mail, they
have to return to YOUR site to login. Here are the two top
free email providers for website owners wanting to offer
email to their users:
Search Engine Submission by Addme.Com
-
"Now With More Engines"
Professional search engine submission to 1000's of search engines, classifieds, and announcement
services.
more...
=> ADD NEWS AND WEBFEEDS
This is a simple way to keep your content ALWAYS fresh!
Through the wonders of JavaScript, these services allow you
to add news headlines and content directly to your site.
You can customize it to fit right in with your existing
content, and the headlines update themselves automatically:
This may be one of the more challenging methods of
generating return visits, but it's well worth it if you're
successful. Build a community by offering a forum or message
board on a topic your visitors are interested in. Getting
them started is hard, but once you've got it going, people
will return to check if anybody has responded to their posts
or to read the latest threads. You can easily run one,
whether you have CGI and Perl access on your web host or if
you'd rather have a remotely hosted message board:
If you can successfully make your site "sticky" enough to
bring your visitors back to your site repeatedly, you're
guaranteed success!
Article by Dan Grossman
Over 250 hand-picked resources, articles, and tools when you
visit: http://www.websitegoodies.com - As a bonus, Dan also
publishes the free weekly "WebDevPortal" newsletter for website
owners! Subscribe today and get articles like this every week:
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