Keep Your Readers Coming Back

Posted in Internet

They say content is king. So it is, if you’re looking for search engine traffic. Linkbacks are supposedly just as important, but, once again, are good only for search engine traffic and a pocket full of visitors. Gathering traffic is not hard, hell, I could easily just buy traffic, but keeping users interested in your site or blog can be quite tough. Here are a few tips on how to do just that:

Interactivity - make sure to enable systems which allow viewers to respond to your content. For a blog or news website, a simple comments section can introduce a great deal of attachment between the viewer and your site. More often than not, a viewer who comments will return to see who else responds to their comments. Should someone have responded to their comment, there’s an even greater chance that same visitor will return for future discussion.

Don’t offer the same old frontend - many a times have I personally fell into this trap. By offering an open source CMS-based, run off the mill design and site, you open up doors which may lead to trouble in the future. Disgruntled users in search for power may grab your trade secrets and open up a site of their own, using your valuable past experiences, and even steal your own members. Also, it’s easier to hack and/or abuse a site which is built off a familiar system/design, then one that is exclusive. Furthermore, a competing site may use the same essential design, which destroys your capability to attain brand-ability and uniqueness on the web.

Controversy is king - I’m not saying you should become like Elliot Carver in the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”, but you should definitely try to spice up your news. Catchy titles and entertaining content not only satisfy the news-hungry, but also enhance discussion and seriously bring users back. A site with strong news will have an even stronger community.

Don’t make your site look dead, or too alive - this one is a serious killer for starters, especially sites which focus around forums. Do not excessively post in your own forums. Do not have back-and-forth conversations with one or two members in your forum’s threads, a forum is for thoughtful discussion, not a casual conversation; we don’t need to know about your plans for the night with another member. Do not have more than a one or two administrators/moderators (especially in the beginning). Do not boost the cookie timeout for your forum’s “who’’s online” table or register fake accounts to make it look like there are more users than there really are on your site. Eventually, new members will catch on to that fact and will feel cheated, and leave. Focus on adding quality content to the non-forums part of the site and people will come, in time.

Unique news is good news - ensuring the exclusivity of your news/blog posts will directly affect the return rate of your visitors. If there are bigger, better sites covering your niche already, it’s going to be extremely tough to penetrate the market and advance in both search engines and in reality. Posting a piece of news even a few hours late is too late to be considered “news”. Unless it’s hot off the press, or made in-house, people will have no reason to stick around, unless they are your personal friends. Writing articles, reviews, and interviews can be a great way to build content that will keep users busy until you can get your act together with the news.

Keep your server running fast - I have read somewhere that most Internet users tend to stick away from sites that take more than 4 seconds to load. Though with external banner advertisements, that may be quite hard to achieve on your site (especially if it relies off a database/CPU intensive CMS), it would be a good idea to frequently check out the health of your server, specifically if it is a dedicated server. Try to keep the CPU usage at any given time under 5.00 (with 0.00-1.00 being your main target), and make sure you have more than 30% of your server’s physical RAM free. Investing in your server is investing in the future, as your site grows, so will your site’s processing needs.

With the onset of Web 2.0+ (how I like to call it), it’s important to make your site an environment for users to think for themselves and share their feelings, and maintain a high standard of functionality so readers don’t go elsewhere for their Internet reading.