Always keep your site door open for repeat traffic and let's get sticky, eh?Add Some Glue to Your Site:
Let’s Get Sticky
The world wide web is a jungle – especially for the start-up struggling toward profitability. With all of that heavy hitting competition, webmasters (you) have to spend increasing amounts of time marketing their sites and less time developing site improvements and adding new content.
The key to long-term success is to create site stickiness – a reason for visitors to return to your on-line shop over and over. Sticky content, by definition, provides benefit to the reader. It might be information, humor, the latest (very latest) news within a market sector, tips and suggestions – any information that keeps visitors returning and even book marking your site.
Sticky content could be as simple as the horoscope of the day, a Sudoku puzzle or even just a crossword puzzle. The objective? Less time on content development and more time on marketing while, simultaneously increasing site traffic. Think it can’t be done? Well here’s how to do it on bottle return money.
Post Your Publishing Schedule
If your readership liked article #1, chances are they’ll stop back to read article #2 – especially if you provide the reader with a publication schedule. If visitors know that every Thursday you’re going to post your latest stock prognostications, then all of those self-directed investors just might stop by every Thursday and read this week’s stock picks over their morning lattes.
Don’t push yourself to the limits, promising green content every day. You’ll get tired of cranking out the words and, after a few weeks, the content won’t be as fresh as you and your one-time readers thought it was.
Syndicated Content
Want free, relevant content? Visit sites like goarticles.com and similar sites. Here you’ll find well written (and not so well written) articles on everything from keeping pet turtles to how to make money in currency exchange.
It’s content that might appear on a dozen sites at the same time, so it won’t do much as far as search engines and page rank (too much duplicate content), but it’ll be green to your visitors and that’s what keeps them coming back daily or weekly.
A Newsletter
Hey what’s happening in the heavy equipment industry? Well, if you’re an authority you can probably put together a one or two page newsletter once a week on the topic of your site. These newsletters would then be sent to visitors who have signed up for the information (they’re called opt ins because they opted to receive your newsletter). In your newsletter, you can cover your industry, hobby, avocation or whatever your site’s subject is.
The Site Blog
A few years ago, the blog was almost unheard of. Today, even small sites can have blogs. The better web hosts provide the blog software gratis, so all you have to do is upload posts. The programming is super-easy.
You can control blog content and allow visitors to leave comments. Controversy sells so if you can work in the latest controversy within your sphere, all the better.
The Forum
It looks like a blog but it’s open for posts from anyone – including the nut jobs who populate the W3 landscape. In forums, people can deliver their screeds, rant and rave about this or that and, ultimately, create dialogue between site visitors. Your site becomes a source of opinions, ideas, warnings and other useful information to keep your site sticky like super-glue.
Site Convenience
RSS feeds (really simple syndication) allows you to pick up content relevant to your visitors from many different sites and deliver all of it in one place for sheer convenience. So, the visitor who once had to stop by five or six sites for the latest goings-on in Washington, D.C. can now stop by your site for content from all of those sites and more, saving visitors time. Plus, the content is updated regularly.
To gather RSS feeds you need an aggregator (collector). It’s free. Then, all you do is visit sites offering RSS feeds, click on the ones you think readers will enjoy and present them on your site. And once a feed is in place, you’ll receive regular updates that will keep visitors coming back.
Fun and Games
You can find almost any kind of fun and games free for delivery to your site daily. For example, funtrivia.com will set up a 10-question trivia game on your site every day. It will also provide daily scores, weekly and monthly winners. And it’s free. Once you get a few competitors going head to head, they’ll be back for more.
One of our favorite sites is freesticky.com which offers dozens of features to keep them coming back. A partial list, in no particular order: cartoons and jokes of the day, competitions, games (change them every day), horoscopes and astrology for star gazers, lottery results, maps, tickers, On This Day In History, The Daily Phrazzle®, free articles, viral marketing content, guides and directories and more. Much more. All free and all very sticky.
All you have to do is Google “free site content” and you’ll find hundreds of sites offering games, industry analysis, the latest from the
The Point of Getting Sticky
First, it increases site traffic – something search engines like to see. Second, you’ll get a lot of repeat traffic – something else search engines like. Your site will receive more page views per visitor, which means they stick around longer.
However, the most important reason to add a little glue to your site is because repeat visitors eventually buy something. Oh, they may not buy on their first, second or third stop, but if they keep coming back each day, eventually they buy. There’s an old Madison Avenue adage that says ‘A buyer most hear or see a product six times before it even registers’ and that was back in the day when TV was the main form of access to information.
Get sticky. Save time in content creation. Devote more time to marketing your site. In time, if your site becomes really sticky, you may be lucky enough to start a site community – friends who use your forum or message board to talk to friends.
If you’re working on a shoestring content budget, there are still plenty of options to create and deliver sticky content to your regulars. And in short order, those regulars will become buyers.
You’ll also see a little boost in your search engine rankings as an extra kicker. So start adding some glue to your site and watch that site traffic grow like never before.
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