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Major Communications
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Major Communications
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Before you go and spend thousands of dollars and precious time promoting your website, be sure your current visitors are returning to your site. Otherwise, it's not even worth the hassle of promoting your site in the first place. Your site will never be successful if your visitors are coming once and leave with no intention of ever returning again. If at least 30% of your daily traffic is from return visitors, then your site has an excellent return rate. A good FREE service that will track referring pages and return visitors is Stat Track < http://www.stattrack.com >. This service will also track your total visitors by day, week, and more. Tracking your visitors is a must if you are serious about building your sites' traffic.
So here's what you can do to encourage your visitors to return to your site:
1. The first and foremost thing you must do is, build a sense of community. If a visitor feels they can relate or belong to a certain group or interest, they will more than likely hang around and come back often. The best way to achieve this is to add a discussion forum or bulletin board to your site that will allow your visitors to get interactive with each other. If your site has excellent traffic, you could also add a chat room. Be careful with chat rooms, because if your site doesn't have a lot of traffic, not many people (if any) would be found in your chat room and this may create a bad image about your site.
You can also create a weekly contest for your users to compete in. For example: if you run a hot-rod site, you could have your visitors post pictures and information about of their cars. Then, offer a prize to the contest winner. This could bring your visitors back to your site at least once a week if they're interested in the contest.
2. Be sure your pages appear fresh and are updated frequently. Add a "What's New" section or page on your site. You want to make your website look as "lively" as possible. If you're just starting out with your website and your traffic count isn't really anything worth bragging about, don't add a visitor counter or anything that could give a hint that your site isn't quite a success yet. As with a chat room, this could be a turn-off to anyone who visits your site.
3. You should also start a newsletter or mailing list so you can keep in touch with your visitors, past customers, or potential customers. There are many free services out there that offer to host and manage your mailing list. This is very effective since your message will be delivered directly into your subscribers' mailbox.
4. Ask your visitors to give you a link back to your website. Create a "link to us" page that contains linking images that other site owners can use to add on their pages. You'd be surprised of how many people will link to your site. This is an effective way to get extra visitors to your site. TIP: You can simply go to almost any search engine and type 'link:yoursite.com'. This will enable you to see how many and which sites link to yours.
5. Trading links with other websites that have related content or products is an excellent way to "recycle" your traffic. You must be sure that any sites you trade links with are sending you a similar amount of traffic. There are many programs out there that can track click-thrus from text links that can help keep your deals with other sites in order.
If you're still wondering what else can be done to get your visitors to return to your site, just think about which sites you visit most frequently, and why. Keep your mind open to new ideas and remember that the best way to discover new strategies and methods is through trial and error.
Chris Howard is the Webmaster at Webmasters Only "The Complete Resource Guide for Webmasters and Developers" and runs a free newsletter, which has over 50,000 subscribers and growing fast. The site contains hundreds of webmaster-related resources and also features a webmaster forum.
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