5 ways to keep your visitors coming back
Huffington Post highlights some stats that show email is still a powerful business tool ~ and your author platform is a business. Email offers you a way of staying in contact with your visitors and not losing them to the abyss of the web.
Ask them to join an email list so you can send them fresh information on what’s happening at your site, as well as information on promotions, special appearances or events you’ll be attending in the future.
Here are some interesting stats:
- Your email subscribers drive 41% of comments
- Did you know that organic reach on Facebook (i.e. the number of your fans who actually see your posts in their Newsfeed) is only 6%?
- In contrast, open rates for email marketing messages are generally in the 20 – 30% range
You may also consider adding an RSS feed as well as using social bookmarking sites as a way of staying in contact.
Adding a comments section
Get people returning to your site by offering an interactive comments area. Lots of people enjoy interacting with others and love reading comments made by others. Both of these require a return to your site in order to participate.
How do you get people to comment? Start with writing content that people can relate to and get excited by. Then pose questions so people feel compelled to share their personal experiences.
Curate resources you’ve collected from the web
Create a section on your site where you add bookmarks, links and save articles of interest for your readers. Keep the information section fresh and dynamic by posting new content often.
Visitors will return to your site regularly to see what new stuff you’ve added, or to revisit a favourite article. Just like how you keep going back to that site for that perfect scone recipe or that popular gym workout.
Search engines will also see this as fresh information and the links to other sites makes you an authority on your content ~ increasing your website’s authority in Google.
Great website visual design and enjoyable experience
A seamless, positive experience will greatly improve your numbers of returning visitors.
Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Poor design can greatly affect your returning visitors. Cluttered content and confused navigation will not give your visitors a good first impression and they will be less inclined to return.
When people visit your site, they don’t want to face a bunch of ads, or difficult slabs of dense text. They want the content to be informative and entertaining; easy to digest; and fun to interact with.
Think about creating content that is accessible to your target audience and keeps your reader wanting more. Don’t be afraid to use humour!
You’ve now got some online marketing tactics to keep your followers coming back for more, but what about new visitors? How do you get your website found by Google?
What is SEO and why is it so damn important?
Your website can have all the right content in the world but it actually means nothing if it can’t be found through search engines like Google.
Ensuring that your site is properly optimised makes it easy for Google and other search engines to ‘crawl’ your content and index it in search engine results pages. Any errors in the optimisation of your site can have disastrous effects to your traffic flow. So how do you avoid this?