Building Repeat Visitors For The Long Haul

Filed in Traffic Tips on Dec.06, 2010 By Keith Lunt

If you want to want to increase your website traffic in the long term then the key can be building repeat visitors. Forget about always finding new visitors, you want to be convincing those visitors that are arriving that they want to come back time and again. It is much cheaper and much more effective.

Why is it so effective to draw back visitors as repeat visitors?
Well, if they are already sitting on your website then you do not need to pay for marketing costs to try to drag them to your website. They are there already and ready to be targeted. In fact, marketing to them can be completely free.

There is also the advantage that because the visitor is on your website, if you can convince them back then you marketing to them is a lot easier. It is far easier to work with a visitor that has experienced you, your website or your product before than it is to work with a totally fresh visitor.

What do you need to do to tempt people back?
You need to provide a quality website that is relevant to what people are finding your website for. There is no advantage to optimising your site to off topic keywords in the hope that some people do arrive and take an interest. You want the people landing on your website seeing what you have on offer and taking an interest.

If you want to tempt people to come back again then it helps if you can steer them to more than just the page that they land on. If they spend a bit of time reading different pages and taking an interest in what you have written, then this means that they have more time in which they might decide that you are a valuable mine of information.

How can you keep them reading?
For a blog, it is quite easy. Use plugins that will list related posts and drop this information at the bottom of the post, so that as the reader gets to the bottom of the post (which shows they were interested in it if they read it all) then you are making suggestions as to where to read next.

For other sites, try the same tricks. Point out further reading or link to more detail pages. Anything that you can do to make sure that people keep on reading.

Finally, give them the option to come back
Making it easier for your visitors is a good way of making sure that they can come back. Make sure that your RSS Feed link is obvious. At the end of each page give links to social networking and other bookmarking tools. Even if you provide an RSS Feed you should still run a newsletter for those that prefer to follow you in that way. If the options are there, they might be used.

Give your readers a reason to come back and a way to come back and they will do. It’s the easiest and cheapest way of increasing future traffic!