Increase traffic with return visitors

More often than I'd like to see, webmasters make the mistake of assuming that the easiest way to increase traffic is to attract as many new visitors as possible. This belief is partially correct, but a site cannot become truly popular unless it also appeals to these new users so much that they decide to come back again and again.

We all have a few favorite places in the web where we stop by every now and then to get the information and entertainment we need. One of your important goals as a siteowner is to make your site such a place for as many people as possible. The better you succeed in doing so, the more products you will sell and the higher your revenue from advertising will be.

Why is it important to increase return traffic?

There are many reasons why you would want your visitors to come back to your pages. If you sell banner advertising space, you can easily calculate that a person who comes to your site, looks at five pages and then returns ten times within the next year and checks out an average of two pages per visit is four times as valuable to you than one who reads five pages but forgets all about you after leaving.

Owners of online stores benefit from an increase in return traffic as well, because in many cases it takes more than one visit to make the sale. The visitor might not need your product right now, but if he bookmarks your site and uses that bookmark once in a while, he is likely to buy from you when the time is right.

Another advantage that arises from such visitor loyalty is that those who regularly visit your site often mention it to their friends, family and colleagues. This can easily create a so-called traffic virus, which is born when people tell about you to their acquaintances, who then spread the word to their own acquaintances and so on. While it might not sound like a very big deal, word-of-mouth is the primary source of traffic for many larger sites and the reason they have become what they are today.

Just when I think I'm out - they pull me back in

I'm not going to waste your time by going on and on about the value of return traffic. You know that it will benefit your site and for our purposes, that is enough. From this point onwards, we will be focusing on the most important issue - what do you need to do to get people to keep returning to your pages?

While there is no magic formula, there are many things you can do that will increase the likelihood of your users turning into regular visitors. The first and foremost step is to have a great site that is filled with high quality content. That sounds like self-evident and it is, but it is also the foundation that you will be building on. If your site is not the best thing that has come along since sliced bread, all the tricks in the world won't help you to lure your visitors into visiting it for a second time. Would you go back to a page that you found to be boring, starved of content and lacking useful information?

Even if your site is truly among the best, the harsh truth is that you will have to update it continuously if you want to retain the interest of your visitors. This means adding unique, fresh content every now and then or at the very least updating and improving the content you already offer. The more often you can do this the better, but once or twice a month is the very minimum that must be met.

If someone comes back two or three times within two months and nothing changes between these visits, he's likely to think that the site is no longer being updated and go elsewhere. On the other hand, if there is a lot of new articles to read each time, you'll probably see him come back several times more. Consider adding a "What's new" page of somesort to inform your regular visitors about recent developments and make sure that you have plenty of things to report on it.

Simply having good content and updating it often goes a long way towards establishing your site as a regular stop for many surfers. However, there are plenty of other things that can help you in your task and convert an even larger part of your visitors into regulars.

Start a newsletter

Running a newsletter takes a lot of work, but brings large rewards in return. If you are able to get your visitors to subscribe, you can then E-mail your newsletter to them without the fear of being accused of spamming. This way they won't forget that your site exists and after reading your E-mails for a while, they will remember its address even in their sleep.

Your newsletter can be a simple announcement service that lets everyone know when you have made changes to your site, have several original articles in each issue that pertain to whatever it is your site is about or be something in between these two. In any case, you should keep in mind that the more unique content your newsletter offers, the more interest it will attract. A simple announcement service is merely an extension of your site, but a high quality newsletter can become so famous that people come to your pages just to subscribe to it.

Remind people to bookmark

There are two schools of thought on this subject. The first believes that offering a link to bookmark your site will increase the amount of visitors who do so. Because remembering Internet addresses is difficult for some, being bookmarked ensures that you won't be losing return traffic just because the user happened to wander off and then forgot your URL.

The second school thinks that while it is important that your site gets added to the surfer's bookmarks or favorites, asking for someone to do so isn't very effective. The supporters of this line of thought say that if someone knows how to use bookmarks, he will also know how to add them. All you will have to do is to provide enough good stuff that will convince the visitor that adding your site to the favorites list would be a good idea.

I'm leaning towards the latter opinion, but my mind is not completely made up yet. So, it might not be a bad idea to consider adding a "Bookmark now!" link, provided that you're able to integrate it to your design so that it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. I will be running a test on this subject in the near future, so remember to stay tuned.

Add a monthly sweepstakes

Giving something valuable for free is a sure-fire way to get some extra hits. The word about sweepstakes and contests usually tends to spread well on its own, but running one will also give you the opportunity to submit to the hundreds of sites that list sweepstakes and competitions. As a result, you should see a nice increase in traffic and also get more return visitors as people come back to enter next month's sweepstakes. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, there's a small fly in this soup. The traffic you will receive is interested in winning the prize, not exploring your site and seeing what it has to offer. That is why I'd recommend that you choose a prize that should attract the kind of audience you want to capture instead of random sweepstake-enthusiasts.

To give an example, if my site sold gardening tools, I'd set up a contest where participants could win a set of gardening equipment and a subscription to a gardening magazine instead of offering money as a prize. There would be less visitors and less entries, but the people that would come just might buy something instead of simply entering the competition and leaving.

As said above, offering other than money as a prize is usually a good idea, but you should also prominently display the estimated value of your prize in dollars. "A set of rare comics" doesn't sound exciting, but "$395 worth of rare comics" sounds a lot better, don't you think? Whatever you do, make sure that the prize is worth winning but also one that you can afford.

Discussion forums are like glue

I'm not kidding you. A well-maintained, busy discussion forum can become a huge success. There are several sites I originally visited because of the content, but after a while the biggest reason that kept me coming back was that they had such great discussion forums.

The best part about these boards is that most of the content is produced by the visitors themselves and even moderating them can be partially transferred to the most intelligent and reliable participants. You will have to stop by every now and then to read and write messages, answer questions, remove offensive content and otherwise make sure that everything is going all right, but that isn't very hard work.

However, before you break out the champagne and start dreaming about your new automatic content generator that will draw surfers by the thousands, you'll need to hear about the negative sides. The largest problem is that your site must be popular, very popular, when you start your forum. A forum is like a nuclear reactor, it needs to achieve critical mass before it starts working on its own. If your site doesn't get enough traffic, the forum won't be frequented by many users and they will write very few new messages.

This "critical mass" can become a vicious circle, because when there aren't any new messages, users won't be tempted to come back to the forums and won't write new messages. Most message boards suffer from this syndrome in the beginning, but the operator can alleviate it by actively participating to old threads and by starting new ones. However, even that won't help if the forum just doesn't have enough traffic, so wait until your site has grown a bit before you try this trick.

Make your address easy to remember

Our last suggestion is very simple to implement and doesn't cost much, but there are many sites out there today that haven't taken up on it for one reason or another. Let's be honest, is http://www.angelfire.com/music/joeysmp3s/ or www.joeysmp3s.com easier to remember?

Domain names are cheap these days, you can get one for around ten bucks or less. If you value your site at all, and because you're reading this you probably do, get one. It will help people to remember your address and your site will also seem to be more reliable and professional than it would if you didn't have your own domain.