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Adding Stickiness to Your Site (10/29/2004)
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These 7 tips will help you add content and community that'll keep visitors coming back for more.
Your site is up, so now how do you make it special and filled with
content that attracts visitors and keeps them coming back? That
mission consumes site-builders, both full-time professionals and
part-timers, but if there is one fact we now know to be absolutely
true, it is this: Simplicity is best.
Case in point: The Web site for a luxury hotel chain based in India
features a huge soundtrack of classical music, and it's just annoying.
Maybe some sitar tracks--authentic Indian music--might make sense, but
classical? It's bandwidth-hogging craziness. Resist the temptation to
put something on your site just because you can. Never put up content
that slows access to a page but doesn't demonstrably heighten user value.
What does work? Content that gives users reasons to linger, to absorb
more of what you're offering. You'll find there are many, many ways
to introduce this content, and you are going to have to exercise
real discretion here. Pick a few tools, try them out, monitor user
responses, then delete the ones that aren't proving valuable. Be
ruthless here, and never forget that simple is better.
That understood, here are many tasty tools for you to use in beefing
up your site. Just remember, this may be an all-you-can-eat buffet,
but the more you put on your plate, the more discomfort your Web
site viewers will feel.
E-mail Lists. You want to experiment with a tool that lets customers
talk among themselves about your products and services? An e-mail
list gives you that capability. The smartest, simplest way to create
a list is at areas like Yahoo! Groups. There are many options available.
Lists can be private, open only to members you approve, or public,
open to all who knock on the door. My advice: Experiment with several
types of lists, perhaps a private one for existing customers and a
public one for all comers.
Either way, carefully monitor traffic. To be useful, a list needs a
steady flow of traffic and at least a few messages daily. Initially,
you might encourage friends and colleagues to post just to get the list
going, but eventually you'll need a site that generates sufficient traffic
or your lists will collapse from nonuse. When they work (and they often do),
lists are a fast way to spice up a site with the kind of interactivity that
keeps surfers coming back.
Polls. Polls, where surfers register their opinion on an issue, are at
the heart of the Net because this is interactivity in its most basic
form. Ask any question--"Should pornography be banned from the Web?"
"What's your favorite cocktail?" "Who's your favorite Beatle?" It
doesn't matter: Surfers will want to register their point of view
and see how others voted. AOL has long used polls as a staple on
its pages. Learn from the masters and do likewise.
Writing a poll from scratch is a trick bit of coding, but free
poll templates are readily available for insertion into your site.
All you have to do is fill in the blanks in a template, copy and
paste a bit of code into your site, and you're in business. Sources
of such templates are plentiful, but a good one is from Freepolls.com.
Weblog (blog). At its most basic, a blog is a frequently updated,
timed and dated online journal with a good dose of links involved.
That may not sound like much to get excited about, but it has gone
beyond fad to become a full-fledged Internet phenomenon. The elements
of interactivity, community and collaboration will be key as growing
businesses adopt blogs for customer relations, advertising, promotion
and even internal communications. One well-known business example is
software company Macromedia's use of blogging to keep customers
updated on what's happening with its products.
Chat rooms. Wouldn't it be cool if your site had its own private
real-time chat room? It's both easy to put up and free from LiveUniverse
http://liveuniverse.com. Just search the page for the link to the
chat tool, register and in a matter of minutes you'll be able to
put folks to chatting.
Before you do, however, mull on this: Empty chat rooms look very,
very dumb. Will you have enough traffic to put people into a chat
room on a regular basis? Do you want to monitor it? How frequently?
Know that you won't be on call 24/7--but the chat room will,
theoretically, be available that often. My advice: For most small
sites, this is a tool to avoid.
Better by far is to set yourself up with a free AOL, Yahoo! or
MSN instant messenger account where visitors can fire off questions
to you if you're online. This gives surfers an alternative to e-mail
for finding information, but doesn't expose you to the ridicule that
comes with offering an unpopulated chat room. Do this in combination
with providing a message board, and surfer needs ought to be very
adequately handled.
Guest books. Sure, you could create a guest book using a CGI script,
but probably the easier way is to insert some HTML code into your page--and
you will find it at Bravenet. Why would you want a guest book at all? It's a
convenient way to collect more information about your visitors. And incidentally,
surfers often like to look through guest books.
News feeds, content and more. A secret traffic-builder of the big Web sites
is regularly changing content. Usually that means paying writers and other
content creators big bucks to produce copy, but you don't need to spend that
kind of money.
There are plenty of legitimate ways to get new content without having to
write it all yourself. If you have a special interest site, many of your
readers may enjoy contributing occasional stories, just for the thrill of
seeing their names in virtual print. Also, if you see an article you like
somewhere on the Net, you may be able to get permission to reprint it. I
get requests like these on a regular basis, and I'm usually more than
happy to grant permission. If it's a small site, I don't ask for money;
if it's a large one, sometimes just the extra exposure and an added link
back to my own Web site is adequate compensation.
Another common technique is to incorporate a newsfeed onto your site.
This can be done a lot cheaper than you would imagine, and it automatically
keeps your site updated with a fresh news section. The process is simple:
The newsfeed provider simply gives you a piece of code, which you paste directly
onto your Web page. They take it from there. The news window that this code
makes appear on your site links back directly to their own news server,
constantly updating the content in the background. Two places to look for
newsfeeds are MarketWatch and YellowBrix. If you're on a tighter budget,
there are free or very low-cost models that often supplement their content
with advertising. You can find a list of free sources at FreeSticky. But
examine the content carefully before incorporating it--some of the free
content may be nothing more than a thinly disguised advertisement for
something unrelated to your Web site's mission.
Daily content. As simple as it sounds, many Web visitors appreciate sites
that offer a "tip of the day" and visit them on a daily basis, often in
the morning, to glean the day's tip. Or, they subscribe to a daily
newsletter full of tips--and advertising. Many sites offer philosophical
tips, which assist readers in reflecting on various aspects of their lives.
For example, sites that encourage positive thinking offer some daily message
of optimism. Religious sites offer daily prayers. Literary sites offer quotes
from famous authors. Humor sites offer daily jokes.
To start, you don't have to come up with 365 of them; instead work on one
month's set of tips. Then, say one month ahead. It helps to consult a
calendar for the coming year so you can align your tips with the days
of the week, holidays and other special occasions. When you consume all
365 tips (or less if you choose just to update Monday through Friday),
feel free to dispense the same tips again for the coming year. Few Web
site visitors, even those who visited your site every day to read the
daily tip, will be aware or concerned that one year's set of tips was
the same as the last. In subsequent years, however, it probably does
make sense to develop new sets of tips. You can only run the same
information for so long.
Source: Entrepreneur.com
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