Ongoing Website promotion

How to get those visitors to keep coming and coming.....

[agerhart]

You have your website up, and it is a success. You have optimized it to the best of your ability and it gets good rankings in the search engines. You have solid content that will keep the visitors interested, and your website has a nice design so that they don't feel like that they are on a website that was built in 1980.

Your traffic increases and keeps increasing at a nice pace, but at a certain point the traffic levels and maintains at this level.

But you want more.....of course you do, you are in SEO, you want all of the traffic!

So, how do you go about this? What is the golden secret?

There are certain things that can, and should be done to keep the users coming and coming back repeatedly:

- Update the content on your website
- Have interactivity on your site WebmasterWorld is a perfect example of how well this works
- Offer something unique
- Advertise on the Internet
- Keep working on link pop
- Continue your optimization efforts
- Affiliate Programs what is the concensus on this?

Now, let's hear what everyone thinks. What do you do to keep the traffic coming?.....unique and repeat visitors.

[drbill]

Agerhart,

I have to agree with you. Unique content and frequent updates really help.

Another thing that really works and it seems to work on almost anything is getting a news feed. YUP get a script that looks for news that matches the content on your site and feed it. SO they can keep uptodate on the news about your products... Also Offer the surfer a link that says Book mark us. Make it easy for them to become a bookmarker.

Design is a big thing. I remember when some browsers would not deal with Frames very well LOL that feels like a lifetime ago.

This is my 2 cents

[sugarkane]

> Unique content and frequent updates

And an opt-in newsletter to announce updates, with a signup option on every page.

[Macguru]

Herr, this will seem quite obvious to us, but forums do help. :)

[msgraph]

>>>Another thing that really works and it seems to work on almost anything is getting a news feed.

I'll second that. Related news feeds will definitely bring people back. Just make sure your provider keeps them up-to-date.

[Ove]

Andrew

Brett will know the aswer;-)

/Ove

[agerhart]

I have thought about using a forum, but the amount of work and monitoring that goes along with this is a bit too much I think.

[Ove]

I think forum is a good thing but if you have it on your own site the peóple who is visiting your site could be your clients but they reading and reading and they talk to their own webmaster to fix the site maybe i am paranoid
but it is a chance to loose some clients and maybe to get one

/Ove

[agerhart]

I think that you will always run into this problem if you are offering content on your website. There will always be someone that thinks that they can do it in-house with the info that you have provided them with.

[Macguru]

About forums, my only experiences with it are when the client's ressources take care of running it. I have had it it real estate, art and local car dealer sites. Traffic is low on thoses sites. I agree that it can be very expensive or time consuming to run forums on high traffic sites.

For transactionnal sites with potential for repeated purchases giving some volume discount can be motivating.

I care for a stamp and coins site using this. Clients get 1 point per item purchased and points give them up to 30% discount. But stamp collectors are already potential repeat buyers. This mesure is to turn them in loyal clients with the edge over competition.

[JamesR]

As a user myself, I want to go to a place where I can get info that no one else has. I also want info from experts. I want to view info that is up to date. (I sound like a whiny child with all these requests....)

For me, I try to meet all my desires for a site first. I am my own test subject. I try to continually improve on what I have and think of information that users would want and then how to present it in the most clear and usable way. I think once you establish the reputation of the site, it is not the time to sit back and enjoy but work all the harder to keep it cutting edge.

[jeremy goodrich]

>>>Sign up on every page...

That sounds like a good idea...so, should I put the "sign up" box on every page, or a clear link about the newsletter?

[agerhart]

Jeremy,

I personally think that it is better to have a small sign-up option on each page. Don't make it stand out too much, as it will look pushy......but I think that if you have it on each page you will see a better result.

[sugarkane]

> should I put the "sign up" box on every page

That's what I do, with a 'come on' related to the particular page's subject. Works well.