SoloSEO

5 Ways to Get Visitors Coming Back Every Day

Posted by Michael D Jensen on October 30th, 2008

Launching “Link Bait” is a new and popular strategy for gaining traffic and links (and hopefully conversions), but one of the problems is that one visit isn’t enough! I’d like to discuss 5 ways to help keep your visitors coming back every day, besides just posting more often and having good content! Before I get to those steps, let’s look at some numbers. “>ComScore has some interesting statistics about what type of content gives “Stickiness” to your site (note, from 2006):

1) Portals (28.7 average usage days per month)
2) Entertainment (15.2)
3) Community (14.3)
4) News/Information (14.0)
5) Search/Navigation (13.6)
6) Email (13.2)
7) Directories/Resources (11.8 )
8 ) ISP (11.6)

Portals (think Yahoo!, iGoogle, anything people might make their homepage) brought in the most days per month visited, most likely due to a default home page being visited every time a browser is opened. The next two, Entertainment and Community, seem to me to go hand in hand with what we call Social Media now. Surprisingly, search is #5, which I thought would be at the top (at least for my usage, I search multiple times every day).

5 Ways to Improve Visitor Retention

So now that we have some idea, at least relatively, of what keeps people coming back, here are some actionable things (and real examples) you can do for your site to get visitors coming back every day:

1) Integrate Dynamic, Interesting Content - Recently Loren Baker, Dave Snyder, Jordan Kasteler, and Lief Nissen launched IMBroadcast.com, a niche site geared towards SEOs that brings together videos and other media content all in one place. The content is always changing, there is an RSS feed, and its not just fluff or dumb videos, but actually useful content. This fits under the categories of Entertainment and Community.

2) Create a Community - Just like IMBroadcast created its own community, you can create your own community where people in your industry are interested in participating, discussing, and contributing. This could be as simple as a forum or a discussion board, or you could create your own social network even (you’ll have to consider the audience size, and potential interest in something like this).

3) Run a Contest - ShoeMoney’s comment contest is a prime example of a great way to bring back visitors every day. Even if you don’t run a contest like his, the idea is that a contest can be used to keep visitors checking back often, or to subscribe to your RSS feed. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim runs contests every now and then (this one I actually won!), and one of his neat ideas was to put in a message that you could only see if you subscribed to the RSS feed, so you had to be subscribed to participate. Running contests isn’t for everyone, but if you have at least a couple hundred readers/visitors it can make it worth it. Be clever!

4) Email Subscription to your Blog - There are several WordPress Plugins that make it easy to create an email subscription for your blog. Once you post, an email goes out to anyone signed up, which is a great alternative to non-RSS readers.

5) Post in a series - Although probably not practical to do all month long, posting a “series” that has an ongoing theme that all fit together can be a great way to bring readers back to your site. Announce the series and make sure everyone knows it will go on for 3 days, 5 days, etc. Then when you write and post the series, make sure to link to the first page that announced the series, and possibly the previous article in the series. As an example, Sugarrae recently did this with a series on Reasons you Fail at Affiliate Marketing.

What are some other ways you use to keep your visitors coming back to your site every day?

3 comments October 30th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Don’t blog to live, blog to sell

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on October 28th, 2008

Back on October 15, (I just read it today, I’m a bit behind in my reading) Andy Beal had a post about blogging and making a living as a blogger. I like Andy, I like his presentations, I like his business sense, and I just like the guy. He is one of the few that has made a decent living (I assume) as a blogger. But I have to tell you, as a small business owner, with a little knowledge on how to set up a business, the very thought of attempting to make a living as a blogger isn’t one I would try. Andy discusses how the price advertisers are willing to pay for an banner spot on popular blog is dropping, and then finishes his post by sharing 9 ideas on how he and others have generated revenue through their blogs. I have to be honest, of the 9, only two seem to have real direct revenue potential, and the other 7 would not generate enough to make much separately, but combined they might eventually contribute to some decent revenue, if the blog enjoyed tons of traffic.

Ok, now I am more of traditional guy, I think most reading our blog are too. In fact, based on the types of companies/sites using our SEO Tools (yes we do go out and visit your sites to see what you are all up to), and I think we are all in a similar boat. Most of us sell stuff. We sell products, we sell services, we sell whatever anyone will buy. If there is a market, and we can find a product to sell in that market, we will set up a site and go for it. That is what I think is a true online business ultimately should be. These Adsense, content, blogging, and other type sites just don’t make much sense to me.

So personally, I would never suggest to anyone that they should get a blog site going to watch the money roll in from advertising dollars or whatever else. There are just too many other good products and services to sell online. As I see it, a blog should always be a supplementary tool to benefit your site, it isn’t a direct revenue stream, but instead it provides an outlet for an important aspect of SEO and supports your message.

For most, if not all our clients, we suggest creating a blog. It is an excellent way to get content up, communicate with clients, entice potential clients, deal with customer service issues, and discuss new products and services. What a great way to keep the conversation going, and for getting your site indexed on a regular basis. But let’s not get too fixated on it, concentrate your efforts on selling your stuff, and use the blog to assist in the sales efforts.

I hope there is no one out there who is considering setting up a blog only site for big profits, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like voting for Obama and expecting the world to be a better place November 5th. The likelihood is slim to none, and slim just left the building. Focus on what makes money, moving product, use your blog to assist you sell, then your blog will be all is should be.

Oh, just as a quick editor’s note, if Obama wins…. SoloSEO and the rest of our companies will be raising prices to compensate for the higher taxes we will face, and we will most likely be letting a few folks go (as will the rest of the small business world), sorry. I guess higher prices and higher unemployment do constitute “change”, so there is one politician not lying to us, which is nice.

2 comments October 28th, 2008 Aaron R Stewart

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