5 ways to keep your visitors coming back to your web site
Often the sites with the highest profit margins are targed toward one time visitors. Many Adsense publishers focus solely on getting visitors to click on that ad as soon as possible and exit their site. Is this the best strategy when that same visitor could click on a few ads, contribute to CPM impressions, and even tell their friends about the site?
Here are a few things you do to crank up pageviews an get your visitors to come back to your site:
1. Add an e-mail newsletter to your site. When I send mine out at the beginning of the month traffic spikes. Visitors that saw the site once a year ago can come back again, and again, and again.
2. Link to other relevent content within your site. You may be losing revenue because visitors immediately clicked back instead of exploring your site further.
3. Integrate a regularly updated blog in to your web site. My (brand new) book, Real Blogging, shows the top 5 places to find fresh content blog.
4. Add a forum. There are very few ways you will get people to visit your site daily. This is on of them.
I’ve added forums to two of my sites. One is a brand-spanking new site so nothing to report from that one. The other is an existing site.
One the existing site, I added a poll and a few questions to draw people to answer. I had five registered users the first day with a few posts. In the following 3 weeks…no new posts by visitors.
Creating a thriving forum even in a niche site takes some work - anyone got a good ebook? No, wait let me guess, advertise it in forum signatures, send it out in newsletters, etc. Organic growth definitely isn’t the best/fastest.
Comment by chris — June 21, 2006 @ 10:17 am
Lee from ForumTrends.com is actually working on a forum/communities book. I don’t know how much it will be about growing a new forum vs. running an existing forum.
The number one most important thing about starting a forum is that you already have targeted traffic for the niche. There are a lot of XYZforums.com out there where the front page is the forum and there are 100 posts, all by the admin.
Comment by Andrew — June 21, 2006 @ 11:19 am