Design Website

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

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Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your whole audience.

The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials are real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.

Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.

Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it's a very good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain.

Lastly, ask for the sale! Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. "click the button to buy now!").

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When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

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Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit. 

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

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Before you start worrying about marketing your website on the internet it always pays dividends to look at the website itself and get the fundamentals right before looking to shout about it from the virtual mountain-tops.

You may already have thought about the following 3 ways and some of you may already have them in place on your website. If so ? congratulations ? you''re well on the way to having a website that will bring you more business. So here they are then ? the 3 Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website..

1. You''re Fishing For Visitors ? You''ll Need This To Hook Them.

Ever been surfing on a website that held your attention and then the phone rings? You take the call, take some notes, get distracted, visit another website and before you know it you''ve forgotten all about the website you were viewing. It happens all the time and if you don''t have a Bookmarking tool on your website it will be happening with the people that come to your website. A Bookmarking tool is just a simple link or logo that your visitors can click on in order to bookmark your website or add it to their favourites. It is best to have the button located on the homepage but an even better option is to have a bookmarking button on every page so a visitor can actually bookmark each specific page of your website for safe-keeping. Look to the left of this article and you will see the bookmarking button we use ? click on it to see how it adds this specific page to your favourites ? nifty eh?

2. ''X'' Marks The Spot.

Visitors come to your website and if you''re lucky ? they like it and click beyond the homepage. Excellent. But they can''t find what they''re looking for. Uh oh, you could be in trouble. There''s a lot of information on your website and Mr. Visitor doesn''t have time to sift through it all to find what he''s looking for. You''d better hope that he''s either very patient or that you''ve provided him with a simple map to help him get to the ''treasure'' he is looking for. A Site Map is an essential item ? particularly on larger websites.

There is nothing more frustrating than hunting around for something and wasting time when just a simple one pager that presents a summary of all the information on your website could be used. A Site Map should be reachable from all pages of your website in just one click and should have clickable links on it so that a visitor can zoom straight through to their desired location without having to hunt around. If you don''t give them a map your visitors may become frustrated searching around for that desired piece of information and they may leave your website never to return.

3. Don''t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You

If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage ? never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you ? all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that''s it.

Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn''t the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit ? you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No ? of course they wouldn''t! That''s why you need a form.

Mike Cheney, www.magnet4web.com (c)

About The Author

Are You Getting Your MagnetMail? - Mike Cheney''s World-Famous Free Magic Mail To Make Your Website Magnetic, Get Yours Now: www.magnet4web.com/website_services/?page=magnetmail', 242, '3 Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website, Web-Design, Web-Design articles, Web-Design information, about Web-Design, what is Web-Design, Web Design Information', '3 Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website plus articles and information on Web-Design

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So your web site''s online and you''ve got high rankings in the search engines attracting lots of visitors. But the statistics tell you most of them are leaving after viewing just one page, what''s gone wrong?

One possible cause could be a slow download speed of your web site''s homepage or the web site as a whole. There is nothing worse than having to wait for a web site to load up. Studies indicate that the majority of visitors will only wait 3 - 5 seconds for a homepage to load up before clicking elsewhere. If your homepage doesn''t load up in this time (from a standard internet connection) you are running the risk of losing lots of visitors before they''ve even read the content of the homepage.

They Won''t Hang Around!

You should always assume that most visitors will be connecting to the Internet using standard equipment - not super-charged fast connections. The main culprits of slow download times for a homepage are images. Just remember - every part of every web page you view has to travel down the phone line and onto your screen - the larger the item the longer this will take to happen. It is for this reason that you will sometimes notice the text on a web page loads up on your screen before the images. This is because of the simple reason that images are larger in file size than text and therefore take longer to come down the phone line.

The more large images you have your homepage the slower it will be to download. Nobody is saying get rid of all images from a homepage - as with many things in life - they key to success is balance. Try not to sacrifice your web site''s aesthetic for quicker download times but, at the same time, don''t have large images or animations on the homepage, as these will take longer to download.

Does Your Homepage Need To Go On A Diet?

As a rule of thumb it is recommended that a homepage be around 40 - 50 Kilobytes in size. Any larger and will be a slow downloading homepage, any smaller and it will be quicker than average. One of the best ways to decrease download times is to reduce the number of images being used or optimise them by reducing the number of colours they use or cropping them slightly.

Other pages on your web site are less important than the homepage when it comes to download speed as by this point users will already have made the commitment to enter the main body of the web site and will therefore be willing to wait a little longer for the information they require.

Mike Cheney, www.magnet4web.com

About The Author

Are You Getting Your MagnetMail? - Mike Cheney''s World-Famous Free Magic Mail To Make Your Website Magnetic, Get Yours Now: www.magnet4web.com/website_services/?page=magnetmail', 242, 'Speed Up Or Lose Out! How To Improve Your Websites Download Speed, Web-Design, Web-Design articles, Web-Design information, about Web-Design, what is Web-Design, Web Design Information', 'Speed Up Or Lose Out! How To Improve Your Websites Download Speed plus articles and information on Web-Design

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This article may come as a surprise to you.

Especially since it is written by a web designer. Let me explain......

Rescue Your Web Site from Boring Words and Poor Design.

The difference between a successful website design and a site that brings in zero or very little business is not how nice the graphics are, not the colors you choose. It''s not the flashy animation, and it''s not your precious company logo.

I''m not saying to remove these elements. Some of them are important. But they''re mostly ego-driven. They are "me" messages, and have absolutely nothing to do with what you want your visitor to do.

And what is that you ask? The answer is of course. You want your visitors to buy something.

People who are considering doing business with you are only interested in one thing; "What''s In It For Me?"

One of the first steps toward a successful website is writing copy that tells the reader what''s in it for him, in a style that is easy to read.

Make More Cash

Study any website that makes money and I promise you''ll see the following copy elements in place:

In the main body copy, the text color is always black with a white background, making it easy to read. This should be obvious, but it''s amazing how many websites out there do not follow this very basic guideline.

Testimonials, and other secondary elements commonly use a contrasting font such as courier, courier new. The background in light blue, beige, or yellow shade to make it stand apart from the white background of the main body copy.

Verdana is the most widely used font for your body copy. This font was actually developed for use in the web. Times New Roman, Arial, and Georgiana are also popular. Never use more than two different font faces in your sales copy.

The use of yellow highlights, italics and bold font-style for emphasis.

Headlines and Subheads are usually a contrasting color from the black body text. A shade of red, dark green and dark blue are good colors. However, do not use more than three or four different colors.

Sentence and paragraph font size is commonly between 8pt. and 12pt. Never smaller than that, and never bigger.

Headlines and sub headlines usually between 14pt. and 18pt.

Paragraphs never justified. Most common is left-margin with no indent.

How To Write Successful Headlines

In your sales copy you need an attention-grabbing headline and a compelling sales message full of benefits, clearly describing what your product or service is all about.

Legendary copywriter Ted Nicholas author of 14 best-selling books including "Magic Words That Bring You Riches" has these excellent tips on writing headlines

"Start with a well thought out headline."

"Five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. It makes sense, therefore, to spend the major portion of your effort on headlines."

"A good headline motivates action by stirring an emotion"

"Write as many as 250 headlines before settling on one"

13 Proven Headline Words

Announcing...

Secrets of...

New...

Now...

Amazing...

Facts you...

Breakthrough...

At Last...

Advice to...

The truth of...

Free...

How would...

How to...

How To Write Attention-Grabbing First Sentences

Joe Sugarman (of blu-blocker sunglass fame) and author of best-selling book "Advertising Secrets of the Written Word" has these tips on writing first sentences;

"Keep it short, sweet and almost incomplete."

For example:

It''s easy.

It had to happen.

It''s time.

It''s crazy.

The sole purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence.

How To Write Attention-Grabbing Ending Sentences

"You must plant seeds of curiosity for the reader." "At the end of a paragraph offer a reason to read the next paragraph."

Using sentences such as.....

But there''s more.

So read on.

But I didn''t stop there.

Let me explain.

Now here comes the good part.

These tips represent just the tip of the iceberg on breathing new life into your half-dead web site.

We''ll cover all of the other necessary elements in future articles. Stay tuned.

I hope that you have found this information to be helpful in your pursuit of excellence. Thank you for reading.

Regards,

Dave Peterson

About The Author

Dave is not only a Professional Website Designer. He also incorporates exciting state-of-the-art marketing strategies and expertise that help clients put more cash in there pockets. Providing great value to his clients.', 242, 'Breathe New Life Into Your Half-dead Website By Using Words That Sell, Web-Design, Web-Design articles, Web-Design information, about Web-Design, what is Web-Design, Web Design Information', 'Breathe New Life Into Your Half-dead Website By Using Words That Sell plus articles and information on Web-Design');

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